Charming beauty: CP violation and spectroscopy at LHCb

Why are the earth, the stars, our galaxy and everything we can see made out of matter? During the big bang, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts, so where has the antimatter gone? There is no evidence of anti-matter galaxies or other large structures in the universe.

These questions lead to a more profound question, given that the matter and antimatter should have destroyed each other; why are we here? These questions have fascinated me since my late teens and were responsible for guiding me into the field of physics and later specialising in particle physics. My career to date has focused on understanding differences between matter and antimatter, which are (almost) perfect mirror images of the other.

The programme of research in this proposal aims to study these differences more precisely than ever before, and to look for new differences that are not explained by our current theories and models. In fact, we already know our theories are not a complete description of everything in the universe, and several hints have appeared recently in this field of particle physics.

This research plan will provide new inputs to understand whether or not these hints are real effects of just statistical fluctuations. To achieve these goals, the equally exciting challenges of dealing with huge data samples and utilising the latest computing technologies and software must be conquered. These challenges are increasingly common and important in many fields of science, but also to businesses and the wider world.

I will perform these exciting measurements using data from the LHCb detector, based on the large hadron collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. The LHC collides particles, called protons, at incredible energies to produce other particles that we are interested in studying.