NA62 Experiment

Members of the CERN Theory Group visited NA62 last Friday, where they were greeted by experimentalists representing both the NA62 and HIKE experiments.

Scintillator samples for the HIKE experiment, using innovative materials with brighter and faster emission and better radiation resistance than conventional ones. Two of the samples make use of perovskite “quantum dots”, for which the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded.”

This photo shows the control circuits for the NA62 CEDAR. At the top, in black, you can see a programmable logic controller (PLC). The PLC provides and controls the voltage sent to the various motors of the CEDAR, and reads and interprets the values of several sensors.

The NA62 computing centre, known as the PC Farm, is currently being upgraded. Here you can see one of the new computing nodes, which hosts two processors with 32 physical cores, and 256GB of RAM. The upgraded PC Farm will comprise 30 of these nodes

This shot was taken a few weeks ago during a beam-test for the SHADOWS experiment, which took place in the NA62 experimental hall. The "purple thing" in the background is part of the safety system for the NA62 KTAG detector.

Another new paper from NA62! Take a look at our study of the K⁺→π⁰e⁺νγ decay here link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Check out this new NA62 paper on the search for dark photons, achieved by using NA62 as a beam-dump experiment link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Here you can see LAV 12 being installed at NA62 in 2014, no less than 10 years ago! This is the most-downstream of the LAV stations, and the only one that sits outside of the large vacuum tank.

This little device is a pt100, which changes it's resistance according to temperature. The pt100 is combined with a static resistor to obtain precise temperature readings in and around the NA62 CEDAR.

This optical setup was used to align eight spherical mirrors for the KTAG detector. A small laser (bottom, center) shines light towards the mirror support, where four mirrors can be seen. The light is reflected onto a target on the left of the picture.

This photo shows one station of the CHANTI detector. The white part is a stack of triangular-shaped plastic scintillator, which produce light when a charged particle passes through them. The light is collected by silicon photo-multipliers located at each end of the bar.

This photo shows four of the silicon photo-multipliers (SiPMs) used for the NA62 charged hodoscope (CHOD) detector, which measures the position of charged particles as they pass through the experiment. Each SiPM shown here is about 1mm x 1mm in size.

Earlier this week, the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) Kazakhstan signed the Memorandum of Understanding for the NA62 experiment. INP Kazakhstan is now a member of the NA62 collaboration, making NA62 the first CERN experiment where a Kazakh institution is officially involved.

This photo shows the descent of CEDAR-H into the NA62 experimental cavern, taken in February this year. The NA62 cavern is about 15 meters below ground.

These scintillator tiles are candidates for the new calorimeter of the HIKE experiment. The blue tiles are an improved version of the plastic scintillators already used in NA62. The yellow-green tiles are crystals made from perovskite “quantum dots” just 10 nanometers in size!

Check out this NA62 article in the CERN courier, discussing an upcoming results from operating NA62 as a beam-dump experiment! cern.ch/na62darkphotons

Experts at CERN have recently aligned eight spherical mirrors for the KTAG detector, which collects the Chereknov light produced by the new CEDAR-H. Here you can see a small laser in the foreground, four mirrors on a support cylinder, and the target (with laser spot) on the left.

New results from NA62! We recently probed lepton number and flavour violation by searching for the decay K⁺→μ⁻νe⁺e⁺ in the data collected so-far by NA62. Check out the results by searching j.physletb.2023.137679

The interior of the CEDAR. The brown parts are the diaphragm: Chrerenkov light from kaons passes through the small gap between the two blades, while light from other particles is stopped. In front, quartz lenses convert the Cherenkov ring into 8 spots to exit the CEDAR.

The new CEDAR-H detector arrived at NA62 today!