LHCb - Large Hadron Collider beauty

The LHCb experiment will help us to understand why we live in a Universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter.

It specialises in investigating the slight differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called the 'beauty quark', or 'b quark'.

Instead of surrounding the entire collision point with an enclosed detector, the LHCb experiment uses a series of sub-detectors to detect mainly forward particles. The first sub-detector is mounted close to the collision point, while the next ones stand one behind the other, over a length of 20 m.

An abundance of different types of quark will be created by the LHC before they decay quickly into other forms. To catch the b-quarks, LHCb has developed sophisticated movable tracking detectors close to the path of the beams circling in the LHC.