4 ms·
What does this mean? I mean, I guess this tells us the LHCb is working correctly, but other than that I'm not sure what this tells us.
by abyssknight 17y ago
What does this mean? I mean, I guess this tells us the LHCb is working correctly, but other than that I'm not sure what this tells us.
- fhars 17y agoYes, it just tells you that the detector seems to work. High energy physics experiments mostly rely on statistical analysis of large numbers of events these days. There are occasionally situations where there may be a single decisive "golden event", but b-quark physics left that stage decades ago. Now it is mostly about tiny, tiny differences between normal matter and antimatter that only manifest themselves in b and anti-b quark decays and which may explain why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe. [And ugh, when did CERN PR resurrect that stupid "beauty" moniker, everybody has been using bottom and top instead of the pretentious beauty and truth for the third generation quarks since I can remember.]
- retube 17y agoAs an ex (european) physicist, my experience is beauty/bottom have always been used interchangeably.
- retube 17y agoThis is a big milestone for LHCb - it's primary objective is the study of beauty physics, that is physics related to the beauty/bottom quark (that is what the "b" stands for in the name).