National Institute for Subatomic Physics

LHCb: antimatter

What is the difference between matter and antimatter? And why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe?

The surplus of matter probably originates from a split second after the Big Bang, as a result of an unexpected symmetry breaking of fundamental laws of physics.

The LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, has been designed for accurate identification of decay particles and for precise measurement of their tracks. LHCb studies CP-symmetry violation and other rare processes that occur in the decay of B-mesons. B-mesons consist of a quarkantiquark pair, of which one of them is a heavy b-quark (b for beauty), which can oscillate between quantum states of matter and antimatter.

BaBar

The BaBar experiment in the PEP-II collider at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) in California, has been designed for the accurate identification of decay products and for the precise measurement of their tracks. LHCb studies violations of CP symmetry and other rarer processes in the decay of B-mesons.