Experiments in Particle Astrophysics

During the last decade, the field of what is currently called particle astrophysics (that I prefer to the shaky neologism astroparticle physics) has experienced a surprising growth. It is interesting to understand why the cosmic rays, the poor man's accelerator not no long ago, are becoming the object of scrutiny for a continuously growing community of theoreticians and experimentalists. In this article, we made an arbitrary choice of a small number of experiments to illustrate today's state of the art and the future perspectives in this domain. Our choice is based on three facts: the objects detected in each experiment are different, all the selected experiments are in their starting phase and all are spectacular for various reasons. Our aim is to convince the reader of the enormous discovery potential of these ongoing projects and share with him the excitement experienced by those involved in them. (Author) 37 refs