La Salle-URL has received the visit of Dr. Chris Parkes, renowned physicist and spokesperson for the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb), an experiment by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) designed to explore what happened just after the Big Bang. Dr. Parkes gave a special session to talk about antimatter and about the operation of the LHCb, of which La Salle-URL is a full member since last December 2022.
During the special session, which he gave in one of the classrooms at La Salle-URL, the LHCb spokesperson spoke about the experiment as a key tool for understanding the particularities and characteristics of the universe. He also referred to particle physics as a great challenge for both physics and engineering and assured that, within the framework of particle experiments, it is necessary to develop innovative and disruptive technologies.
The Large Hadron Collider Beauty
The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration operates one of the four major experiments at the CERN LHC, and has published more than 650 scientific articles in its first decade of operations. The LHCb has discovered differences in the behavior of matter and antimatter in three new systems and has studied particles that can oscillate in their own antiparticles.
In addition, it has found more than sixty new particles, including exotic particles containing four or five quarks. Due to the peculiarities of quantum mechanics, LHCb is looking for new fundamental physics at energies higher than those of the LHC beams and recently installed his new detector, updating the technology to allow progress in its studies, taking ten times more data and operating during the next decade.
