Charming beauty: CP violation and spectroscopy at LHCb

为什么地球、恒星、银河系以及我们所能看到的一切都是由物质构成的？在大爆炸期间，物质和反物质是等量产生的，那么反物质去了哪里呢？没有证据表明宇宙中存在反物质星系或其他大型结构。这些问题引出了一个更深刻的问题，因为物质和反物质本应相互毁灭；我们为什么会在这里？这些问题从我十几岁起就让我着迷，并引导我进入物理领域，后来专门从事粒子物理。到目前为止，我的职业生涯一直专注于理解物质和反物质之间的差异，这两种物质(几乎)是对方的完美镜像。这项提案中的研究方案旨在比以往任何时候都更精确地研究这些差异，并寻找我们目前的理论和模型无法解释的新的差异。事实上，我们已经知道我们的理论并不是对宇宙中一切事物的完整描述，最近在这个粒子物理领域出现了几个线索。这项研究计划将提供新的输入，以了解这些暗示是否只是统计波动的实际影响。为了实现这些目标，必须克服处理海量数据样本和利用最新计算技术和软件的同样令人兴奋的挑战。这些挑战在许多科学领域越来越常见和重要，但对企业和更广泛的世界也是如此。我将使用LHCb探测器的数据进行这些令人兴奋的测量，该探测器基于位于日内瓦附近法国和瑞士边境的CERN实验室的大型强子对撞机(LHC)。大型强子对撞机以令人难以置信的能量碰撞被称为质子的粒子，从而产生我们感兴趣的其他粒子。

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.