Coming soon at a Large Hadron Collider near you . . .

The story so far:
LHCb is an experiment set up to explore what happened after the Big Bang that allowed matter to survive and build the Universe we inhabit today. Fourteen billion years ago, the Universe began with a bang. Crammed within an infinitely small space, energy coalesced to form equal quantities of matter and antimatter.

But as the Universe cooled and expanded, its composition changed. Just one second after the Big Bang, antimatter had all but disappeared, leaving matter to form everything that we see around us – from the stars and galaxies, to the Earth and all life that it supports.

Although absent from the Universe today, particles known as ‘beauty quarks’ were common in the aftermath of the Big Bang, and will be generated in their billions by the LHC, along with their antimatter counterparts, anti-beauty quarks.

'B' and 'anti-b' quarks are unstable and short-lived, decaying rapidly into a range of other particles. Physicists believe that by comparing these decays, they may be able to gain useful clues as to why nature prefers matter over antimatter.

M 63, The Sunflower Galaxy, in Canes Venatici