The primary purpose of NA62 is the measurement of the decay of the charged kaon in a charged pion and a neutrino-antineutrino pair, one of the rare phenomena foreseen by the Standard Model, which accurately predicts how this particular transformation occurs about once every ten billion of decays of the charged kaon. In addition to providing a precision test for the Standard Model, NA62 measurements will therefore be able to indicate the presence of new physics effects in a complementary way to the research carried out by the LHC (Large hadron Collider) at CERN.
Giuseppe Ruggiero is an INFN researcher and associate professor of elementary particles experimental physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Florence. He was a researcher at the Scuola Normale Superiore, research staff at CERN and a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the University of Lancaster in the UK. He began his scientific activity in the early 2000s at CERN with the NA48 experiment. He then worked on the design and simulation of NA62, being the author of the straw chamber spectrometer reconstruction. Later, he worked on the data analysis of the experiment by measuring the decay of the charged kaon into anti-neutrino, neutrino and pion, as coordinator of the analysis. Ruggiero also served as the NA62 physics coordinator from 2010 to 2018 and as the collaboration's vice-spokesperson, from 2018 until his recent election to the role of spokesperson.