Data taking began in 2015, and the experiment is expected to become the first in the world to probe the decays of the charged kaon with probabilities down to 10−12.

[1] The experiment is designed to conduct precision tests of the Standard Model by studying rare decays of charged kaons.

In order to achieve the desired precision, the NA62 experiment requires a certain level of signal sensitivity and background rejection.

Namely, high-resolution timing (to support a high-rate environment), kinematic rejection (involving the cutting on the square of the missing mass of the observed charged particle from the decay with respect to the incident kaon vector), particle identification (especially distinguishing between pions and muons), hermetic vetoing of photons out to large angles, and redundancy of information.

In order to protect the components of the apparatus, a computer surveillance program allows the currents in the principle magnets along the P42 beam line to be monitored and to close TAX2 in case of error.

This K12 beam-line has a length of 102m, ending at the exit of the final collimator which marks the beginning of the decay fiducial region and points to the NA62 detectors (notably the liquid krypton electro-magnetic calorimeter, LKr).

[9] Placed immediately upstream of the fiducial decay region, the GTK is designed to measure the time, direction, and momentum of all the beam tracks.

The GTK is composed of four hybrid silicon pixel tracker stations labeled GTK0 (installed in 2021) GTK1, GTK2, and GTK3 based on the order in which they are found relative to the beam path.

[10][11] This charged anti-counter detector (CHANTI) is primarily designed to veto events with inelastic interactions between beam particles and the GTK3.

Each of the chambers consists of multiple straw tubes positioned to offer four views to give four coordinates.

The 12 LAV stations are constructed from four or five annular rings of lead glass scintillator detectors surrounding the decay volume.

The IRC and SAC are electromagnetic sampling calorimeters constructed from alternating layers of lead and plastic scintillators.

Electromagnetic showers, initiated by charged particles or photons, are detected via ionisation electrons which drift to anodes positioned inside the liquid krypton.

The system is formed from the NA48-CHOD detector, re-used from the NA48 experiment and formed from 2 planes of scintillating bars arranged vertically and horizontally, and the newly constructed CHOD constructed from an array of scintillator tiles read out by Silicon photomultipliers.

The newly constructed MUV1 has fine transverse segmentation to separate electromagnetic and hadronic components of showers and the MUV2 is re-used from NA48.

The MUV3 is constructed from a plane of scintillator tiles, reach read out by a pair of photomultipliers, and positioned behind an 80 cm iron wall which blocks particles leaving only muons to be detected.