  We present a deep, wide-field optical survey of the young stellar cluster
Alpha Per, in which we have discovered a large population of candidate brown
dwarfs. Subsequent infrared photometric follow-up shows that the majority of
them are probable or possible members of the cluster, reaching to a minimum
mass of 0.035 Msun. We have used this list of members to derive the luminosity
and mass functions of the substellar population of the cluster
(alpha=0.59+-0.05) and compared its slope to the value measure for the
Pleiades. This comparison indicates that the two cluster mass functions are,
indeed, very similar.
