Taking a closer look at LHC

LHCb

The LHCb detector (Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment) is a21m long, 10m high and 13 m wide detector and it’s designed to study CP violation and other rare phenomena in decays of hadrons with heavy flavours, in particular B’s mesons.

Interest in CP violation comes not only from elementary particle physics but also from cosmology, in order to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter observed in our universe, which could be regarded as the largest CP violation effect ever seen. The LHCb experiment will improve significantly results from earlier experiments both quantitatively and qualitatively, by exploiting the large number of different kinds of b hadrons produced at LHC.

B mesons are most likely to emerge from collisions close to the beam direction, so the LHCb detector is designed to catch low-angle particles. Its key elements will be its vertexdetector, that will measure charged particle tracks, and its Ring-Imaging Cherenkov, or RICHdetectors, that will identify different kinds of particles.

Some calculations...

565 scientists from 47 universities (Santiago University, among them) and laboratories from 15 countries are involved in the design and construction of LHCb, with support from many hundreds of technicians and engineers.

AUTHORS

Xabier Cid Vidal, PhD in experimental Particle Physics for Santiago University (USC). Research Fellow in experimental Particle Physics at CERN from January 2013 to Decembre 2015. Currently, he is in USC Particle Physics Department ("Ramon y Cajal", Spanish Postdoctoral Senior Grants).

Ramon Cid Manzano, secondary school Physics Teacher at IES de SAR (Santiago - Spain), and part-time Lecturer (Profesor Asociado) in Faculty of Education at the University of Santiago (Spain). He has a Degree in Physics and in Chemistry, and is PhD for Santiago University (USC).

CERN

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Theoretical physics (TH)

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LHC

Detector CMS

Detector ATLAS