Abstract:
The quest to explore what lies beyond the standard model of particle physics is two prong: on the one side one explores phenomena at the highest possible energies achievable in the collision center of mass (ATLAS, CMS at the LHC). The other way is to look for deviations from standard model predictions of rare processes. This is the road pursued, for instance, by LHCb and NA62 to study B and K decays, respectively.
NA62 is a new fixed target CERN experiment exploiting the SPS high energy protons to study rare kaon decays. The main interest of the experiment is to study the elusive K+ -> pi+ nu nubar decay, which is particularly interesting because its theoretical prediction does not suffer from large hadronic uncertainties.
K -> pi nu nubar can arguably be considered an "experimenter dream" because, as mentioned before, the theory is settled and the onus is entirely on the experimental side. So far the decay has only be studied at rest (E787/E949 at BNL). NA62 is exploring a novel in-flight technique which promises to surpass the stopped one both in terms of kaon flux and in terms of background control.
NA62 has been commissioned in 2014-2015 and it has collected the first physics data in 2016. The colloquium will give a status of the experiment emphasizing the achieved performance of the new detectors. NA62 is a technologically very advanced detector including the capability to fully track a GHz of beam particles with approx. 100 ps time resolution using Si pixels. To minimize the interaction of particles with matters the trackers are operated in a long evacuated tank and it incorporates full calorimetric coverage and complete particle identification.
The quality of the setup enable one to address a broad class of physics subjects including lepton flavour violation, lepton universality and sensitivity to feebly interacting dark particles. Plans for data taking and the future will also be described.