PARTICLE PHYSICS

ALPS Any Light Particle Search Looking for WISPs One of the most exciting quests in particle physics is the search for new particles beyond the standard model. Extensions of the standard model predict not only new particles with masses above the electroweak scale (about 100 GeV), for example SUSY particles, but also so-called WISPs (very Weakly Interacting Sub-eV Particles). The most famous WISP candidate is the axion, which has been introduced to explain the smallness of CP violation in QCD and which turned out to also be a prime candidate for a constituent of the dark matter in the universe. Similarly axion like particles (ALPs), light spin 1 particles called "hidden sector photons" or light minicharged particles seem to occur naturally in realistic embeddings of the standard model into string theory.

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