WHAT IS CERN?

Established in 1954, CERN is a research organization dedicated to learning about what the universe is made of and how it works by using a series of particle accelerators. At CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, protons are accelerated close to the speed of light and smashed together. These collisions mimic conditions when the universe was a hundredth of a billion of a second old.

CERN runs series of six accelerators and a decelerator. Each of these six accelerators are connected in a chain to increase the energy of a particle beam before delivering them to experiments.

WHAT IS THE LHCB?

CERN produces and studies tons of different types of quarks with their colliders. One of these colliders, located 100 meters underground, is the LHCb. The LHCb, also called the beauty project, studies a specific type of quark, the beauty quark. One area the LHCb studies is anti-matter. According to the Standard Model, matter and anti-matter should have been produced in equal amounts after the Big Bang and completely annihilated each other. The LHCb researches this violation of the Standard Model by studying the decay of beauty quarks.