Take a look inside my Hadron Collider.

[the other mike]

It's not really mine. ( I want one though )
It's kind of big.... and probably a little bit too noisy, and I don't even know what it does but I want one.

 

[Moonglow]

It accelerates atoms into a wall and smashes them to see the reactions and possibly sub-atomic particles

 

[Moonglow]

There has been a buzz of excitement surrounding what has been described as “tantalising hints of new physics” emanating from the LHCb experiment at the CERN particle physics lab, but just how excited should we be? In short: a little, but anyone holding their breath is in for an uncomfortable time.

LHCb is one of four big experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. As the “b” in the name indicates, it is intended to analyse decays of particles containing one of the six known flavours of quark, the “bottom” or alternatively “beauty” quark.

Bottom quarks are much heavier than the up and down quarks that make up protons and neutrons of conventional atomic matter, meaning particles containing them have lots of ways they can decay into lighter particles. Particles containing b quarks are also unusually long-lived, and these two properties combined make them very useful to physicists looking for physics beyond the standard model – our current best understanding of all particle interactions.



Read more: Has the Large Hadron Collider finally challenged the laws of physics?