PIZERO_NA62 · Study of neutral pion decays at the NA62 experiment at CERN

Study of neutral pion decays at the NA62 experiment at CERN

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics represents our current understanding of physical laws at subnuclear scales. The SM very successfully describes the interactions of elementary particles, but arguably, it is not the final theory of particle physics. For example, it does not provide any dark matter candidate with properties compatible with astrophysical observations; it also does not explain non-zero neutrino masses. The SM is not entirely satisfactory from the theoretical point of view either; it lacks a description of gravity, and it does not explain the stabilization of the electroweak scale with respect to higher energy scales (the hierarchy problem of the SM). Therefore the primary goal of contemporary particle physics is the search for physics beyond the SM. Direct searches at experiments such as ATLAS and CMS at CERN are trying to observe new heavy states produced in the collisions of high-energy protons. No signal of direct production of new particles has been observed in these experiments so far. Other experiments are trying to find deviations from the SM by performing high precision measurements at lower energies. The presence of new particles or interactions could be revealed indirectly through virtual quantum corrections. One of the most important experiments at the high precision frontier that look for new physics is the NA62 experiment representing the kaon physics research program at CERN. The PIZERO_NA62 project has studied neutral pion decays at the NA62 experiment at CERN using the data sample collected by the experiment in the years 2016--2018. The neutral pion is the lightest meson that plays a crucial role in the study of the low-energy properties of the strong nuclear force. The project's main objective is a new measurement of the branching fraction of the very rare decay of neutral pion into an electron-positron pair. This observable represents a direct probe of the Standard Model of particle physics.

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