Invited Seminar - Giuseppe Ruggiero (CERN) - Kaon Physics in the LHC era: the Experimental Quest for K->pinunu

Wednesday 19 Mar 2014, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Brussels

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

Kaon physics has been one of the building block of the Standard Model and, even in the present era, it can play a fundamental role complementary to LHC. In fact, among the rare B and K meson decays the ultra-rare $K^+\rightarrow\pi^+\nu\bar{\nu}$ and $K_L\rightarrow\pi^0\nu\bar{\nu}$ decay modes are one of the most theoretical clean and sensitive probe of physics beyond the Standard Model, not constrained by the many direct searches performed at LHC so far and, in some cases, capable of testing mass-scales even beyond the LHC reach. The detection of these decay modes, however, is challenging because the branching ratios are below $10^{-10}$ and the experimental signature is very ambiguous: as a matter of fact only few events of the charged mode have been observed up to now. However at least 100 $K\rightarrow\pi\nu\bar{\nu}$ events are needed nowadays for a kaon experiment to be competitive and complementary to the new physics searches performed at LHC. After a broad review of the kaon physics up to the present days, the seminar will focus on the description of the new generation of kaon experiments and, in particular, of the NA62 experiment at CERN SPS. This experiment aims to provide a 10\% precision measurement at least of the branching ratio of the $K^+\rightarrow\pi^+\nu\bar{\nu}$ decay and will start taking data in October 2014.