LHCb Experiment

The Large Hadron Collider Beauty Experiment

The University of Bologna joined the LHCb collaboration in 1998. LHCb is an experiment on the LHC accelerator devoted to the study of the Standard Model, in particular, to the electroweak and strong interactions. Nowadays, the Standard Model provides a hugely successful description of all available experimental data in elementary particle physics. However, the underlying origin of electroweak and flavour symmetry breaking remains mostly unknown, as well as the mechanism stabilising the electroweak scale. The LHCb-Bologna group carries on research activities dedicated to New Physics searches with heavy-flavoured hadrons, exploiting the unprecedented amount of beauty and charm hadrons produced by the LHC and collected by LHCb during Run-1 and Run-2. In particular the members of the group play a leading role in data analysis with the aim of realising: precision measurements of matter-antimatter asymmetries (CP Violation) with beauty and charm hadrons; lepton-flavour universality tests with beauty- and charm-hadron decays; studies of very rare decays of charm hadrons; spectroscopy studies with heavy flavours and study of exotic states; studies of advanced data analysis techniques with hardware acceleration (GPU and FPGA).

The LHCb experiment

VELO

View of the VELO (VertexLocator) detector. The VELO is the main tracking device close to the interaction point.

RICH

View of the mirrors of the Rich Imaging Cherenkov detector (RICH).

Outer Tracker

The outer tracker shown in figure is situated further from the beam pipe and is made of thousands of gas-filled straw tubes

Muon System

View of the Muon Detector located at the far end of the LHCb detector

Magnet

With an integrated field of 4 Tm, the magnet shown in Figure is fundamental for the measurement of the track momentum.

Calorimeter

View of the Electromagnetic Calorimeter, responsible for measuring the energy of electrons and photons.

LHCb - The Beauty Experiment