High Energy Physics Seminars

The CKM (Charged Kaons at the Main injector) collaboration is planning a new Fermilab experiment whose goal is to measure the Cabibbo, Kobayashi, Maskawa matrix element V(td) with a statistical precision of 5%. This is done through the measurement of the branching ratio of the ultra-rare charged kaon decay: K+ -> pi+ nu nu. This measurement will play a critical role in testing the Standard Model hypothesis that the sole source of CP violation in nature resides in the imaginary parts of the Cabibbo, Kobayashi, Maskawa matrix elements. Attacking this question in the kaon sector is both experimentally and theoretically independent of the ongoing programs to measure these same parameters in the B meson sector. To make this challenging measurement a novel decay-in-flight spectrometer has been designed. I will discuss the physics, the spectrometer, and give the status of the experiment.