Speaker
Description
The NA62 experiment at CERN was designed to measure the branching ratio of the ultra-rare decay $K^+\rightarrow\pi^+\nu\bar\nu$ with a decay-in-flight technique. The Standard Model prediction for this branching ratio is very precise and $K^+\rightarrow\pi^+\nu\bar\nu$ is an ideal candidate to search for indirect new physics at high-mass scales. NA62 took its first physics run in 2016, reaching the SM sensitivity for the branching ratio. In 2017 and 2018 the experiment collected, respectively, ~10 and ~20 times more data than in 2016. The results of the $K^+\rightarrow\pi^+\nu\bar\nu$ analysis with the 2016 and 2017 data sets are presented and future prospects are discussed. Moreover, the high-intensity setup, the flexibility of its trigger system and the hermetic coverage of the experiment make NA62 a useful tool for the direct search of very weakly coupled particles in the MeV-GeV range, such as heavy neutral leptons, dark photons and axion-like particles. The status of these searches will be reviewed, along with other BSM searches performed at NA62.
