Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Edinburgh

The LHCb and ATLAS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider will smash protons together at the highest energies ever achieved in a laboratory, searching for why the Universe contains matter and almost no antimatter. This work addresses two of the most fundamental gaps in physics. First, why did matter survive the Big Bang while antimatter vanished? The LHCb experiment will study CP violation—tiny differences in how particles called b-quarks and their antimatter counterparts decay—to see if these asymmetries explain the imbalance. Second, what is the invisible dark matter that makes up most of the Universe's mass? The ATLAS experiment will hunt for new particles produced in collisions that could be dark matter, and will also search for the Higgs boson, the particle that gives other particles mass. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. However, similar curiosity-driven particle physics research in the past gave us the World Wide Web, medical imaging techniques like PET scans, and the superconducting magnets used in MRI machines. A deeper understanding of why matter exists could, over decades, reshape our grasp of the laws governing the Universe.