Accurate measurements of dimuon production in the NA60 experiment

NA60; Thanks to newly developed radiation-tolerant silicon pixel detectors, NA60 can measure dilepton production with unprecedented accuracy, by tracking the hundreads of charged particles produced in a high-energy nuclear collision and selecting those among them that match the two muons measured in the muon spectrometer. In this paper we briefly summarize the NA60 physics motivations, the detector concept, its implementation and some first results available from the data collected in 2002 and 2003, with proton and Indium beams.