
The NA48 experiment was a series of
particle physics
Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of Elementary particle, fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the s ...
experiments in the field of
kaon physics being carried out at the North Area of the
Super Proton Synchrotron
The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a particle accelerator of the synchrotron type at CERN. It is housed in a circular tunnel, in circumference, straddling the border of France and Switzerland near Geneva, Switzerland.
History
The SPS was d ...
at
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...
. The collaboration involved over 100 physicists mostly from
Western Europe
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The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the Western half of the ancient Mediterranean ...
and
Russia
Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...
.
The construction of the NA48 experimental setup took place early 1990s. The primary physics goal – the search for direct
CP violation – was inherited from the predecessor
NA31 experiment. The physics data taking runs took place between 1997 and 2001. The discovery of the phenomenon of direct CP violation, one of the most important experimental results obtained at CERN, was announced by the collaboration in 1999. The publication of the final result was made in 2001. In addition the experiment made a contribution to studies of rare
decays of neutral
kaons.
The following stage of the experiment (NA48/1) was carried out in 2002 and was devoted to high precision study of rare decays of neutral kaons and
hyperons. The next stage (NA48/2) was carried out in 2003–2004 and was dedicated to a large programme of studies of properties of charged kaons, including the search of direct CP violation, studies of rare decays of the charged kaon, and low-energy
QCD
In theoretical physics
Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict List of natural phenomena, natural phenomena. This is in ...
using final state
rescattering.
The successor of NA48 is the
NA62 experiment, which started data collection in 2015 and is dedicated to further studies of rare decays of the charged kaon.
See also
*
NA31 experiment
*
NA62 experiment
External links
NA48 websiteThe experiments NA48 and NA62 at CERNCERN-NA-048experiment record on
INSPIRE-HEP
INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1 ...
CERN experiments
Particle experiments
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