This week, the international conference Beauty2026 is being held in Maastricht under the auspices of Nikhef. Around a hundred specialists in the field of quark physics are participating in the 21st International Conference on B-Physics at Frontier Machines.
These conferences have been held annually since their inception in 1993 to discuss the latest theoretical and experimental results in the field of flavor physics, the domain of quarks in the particle model. The last Dutch edition took place in 2011 at Felix Meritis in Amsterdam.
Much of the research in the field of flavor physics focuses on beauty or bottom quarks. Nikhef is a prominent participant in the LHCb experiment at CERN, which investigates differences between particles and antiparticles, known as CP violation.
The protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms of everyday matter consist of combinations of three up and down quarks. Beauty quarks are heavier second-generation quarks that occur in more exotic and unstable particles, which can also be produced in collisions in particle accelerators.
The Nikhef-LHCb group at Maastricht University is organizing the scientific meeting and the accompanying social program. Participants are coming from Europe, the U.S., China, and Latin America.
Beauty physics is part of what is known as flavor physics, the study of quarks and their interactions via the strong force that holds protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei.
