Testing anisotropic string compactifications in the lab

We derive type IIB vacua which are very promising to put string theory to experimental test. These are Calabi-Yau compactifications with a 4D fibration over a 2D base. The moduli are fixed in such a way to obtain a very anisotropic configuration where the size of the 2D base is exponentially larger than the size of the 4D fibre. These provide stringy realisations of the supersymmetric large extra dimensions scenario and extensions of the ADD scenario which are characterised by TeV-scale strings and two micron-sized extra dimensions. We also study the phenomenological properties of hidden Abelian gauge bosons which mix kinetically with the ordinary photon and get a mass via the Green-Schwarz mechanism. We show that anisotropic compactifications lead naturally to dark forces for an intermediate string scale or even to a hidden CMB for the extreme case of TeV-scale strings.