Babette Döbrich - NA62 status, how to look for Axions and Dark Photons at MeV, and how to hold the mirror up to eV Dark Matter

Fixed target experiments are a particularly useful tool in the search of very weakly coupled particles in the MeV-GeV range, which are of interest, e.g. as potential Dark Matter mediators. The NA62 experiment at the CERN SPS is currently taking data to measure the rare decay K->pi \nu \bar{\nu}. Owing to the high beam-energy and a hermetic detector coverage, NA62 also has the opportunity to directly search for a plethora of long-lived beyond-the Standard Model particles, such as Axion-like Particles and Dark Photons. If, on the contrary, these particles are very light, they are a good Dark Matter candidate and various "funky" direct detection options exist.