LHCb is an international experiment to study the differences between matter and anti-matter. The experiment is the smallest of the four large experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and has a unique design optimised for matter/anti-matter studies using beauty and charm quarks.

This is the web-site for the UK participation in the experiment.  The UK is the largest contributing nation to the experiment.  Eleven UK institutes contribute and the UK constitutes 24% of the full collaboration. In total we are 32 academics, 13 Fellows, 54 Post Doctoral Research Assistants (including applied physicists, engineers, and programmers), 17 technical staff and 62 PhD students.

The UK has a primary responsibility for two key detector systems of LHCb: the Ring-Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) particle identification system and the silicon vertex locator (VELO) system. The RICH system is unique at the LHC and provides LHCb with its flavour-physics capabilities. The VELO provides all LHCb’s time-dependent vertex measurements and has a precision unrivalled in all the LHC experiments.

UK participation in the experiment is funded by the Science and Technology Facillities Council (STFC), with contributions from the participating institutes, the Royal Society and European Union.