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New Physics Signatures in Kaon Decays

Kaon physics provides a unique opportunity to identify new flavour and CP violating interactions beyond the Standard Model (SM). In the SM, implied by the hierarchical structure of the CKM matrix and the GIM mechanism, flavour changing neutral current processes are most strongly suppressed in the kaon sector while the suppression is much less effective in the B meson systems. Thus their theoretical cleanness makes rare K decays, in particular the K -> pi nu anti-nu system, extremely well suited to look for deviations from their tiny SM values. Despite the increasingly stringent constraints on new physics from direct search experiments as well as indirect searches in B meson decays, large enhancements of both K^+ -> pi^+ nu anti-nu and K_L -> pi^0 nu anti-nu are still possible, and deviations from the SM could be observed even for a multi-TeV new physics scale. In addition the correlation betweeen the charged and neutral K -> pi nu anti-nu modes provides insight on the new physics operator structure in K^0 - anti-K^0 mixing and its interplay with rare K decays. Useful model-discriminating correlations exist also in the K_L -> pi^0 l^+ l^- system. Finally the K -> l nu decays provide a clean test of lepton universality and place constraints on new physics complementary to the ones obtained from the searches for charged lepton flavour violating decays.