NA48 experiment

The primary physics goal – the search for direct CP violation – was inherited from the predecessor NA31 experiment.

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 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 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.