The KOTO experiment is a high energy particle physics experiment located at the J-PARC research facility in Tokai, Japan which aims to measure the branching ratio of a very rare decay of a particle called the kaon. This decay, KL→π0 νν, in which a neutral kaon decays to a neutral pion and two neutrinos, is highly suppressed in the Standard Model (SM), however, it is an excellent probe to test for new physics beyond the SM as it directly violates charge-parity symmetry and has small theoretical uncertainties. The SM theory predicts that this decay only occurs once in every 33 billion kaon decays, corresponding to a SM predicted branching ratio of 3 x 10-11. KOTO is currently the only experiment in the world attempting to measure this decay, and from data collected in 2015, set the best experimental upper limit to date to be 3.0 x 10-9 at the 90% Confidence Level, improving the previous upper limit by an order of magnitude. From 2016 to 2018, KOTO collected around 1.5 times more data than in 2015, and the analysis of this dataset has been recently finalized. This talk will focus on the results of the 2016-2018 data set and the current status of the KOTO experiment.
The College of Arts