Studying Beauty at LHCb

Out of the six kinds (or “flavors”) of constituent quarks the b (for “beauty”) quark is the next to the heaviest. The “hadrons”, the observed particles subject to the strong interactions, are bound states of quarks. The b quark lives for about a picosecond (10^-12 sec), a time long enough that its path can be observed in the detectors. This would not be the case for the heaviest quark, the “top” quark that decays too fast even for forming hadrons. Through their decays the hadrons containing the b quark provide an ideal laboratory to study subtle properties of the elementary particle behavior, such as the slight differences between matter and antimatter interactions. These small asymmetries may reveal new phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics and may explain why the universe is composed almost entirely of matter.

Beauty hadrons are copiously produced at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN and the LHCb detector is dedicated to the study of b production and decay. This presentation will introduce the LHCb experiment and discuss the first results of studies of b quarks at the LHC. These results include measurements of the b production cross-section at 7 TeV center of mass energy (as well as those of the charm quark) and the studies on the already large number of decay modes of the b mesons that have been collected. In 2011, a much larger sample of data will be recorded. An outline of the prospects for the search for New Physics with rare b decays based on such a data sample will also be discussed.