“One of LHCb’s specialties is being able to make very precise measurements and so is in an excellent position to look for differences between these measurements and our predictions. Finding such signs of ‘New Physics’ would be fantastic as it would help us to build an ever better theory of the universe.

“Just before Christmas, we unfortunately received some bad news. For some time, we had been getting quite excited about some measurements which seemed to disagree with our predictions (this could have been our time to shine!). In our model we would expect swapping out electrons for muons (their heavier cousins) to have no effect on our reaction rate, but this seemed to not be the case. However, some new results based on updated experimental data showed that this disagreement went away. Sometimes this is just the way science goes and we should still be proud of the improved precision we have been able to achieve on the measurements. Some disagreements with our predictions do though remain so all hope is not lost!

“LHCb prides itself as being the ‘fun’ experiment at CERN and it’s known for putting on a good party! In the New Year, a load of UK researchers working on LHCb descended on the beautiful Scottish city of Edinburgh for our annual meeting. This was a fantastic opportunity to meet up with colleagues and give our young scientists an opportunity to present their work! We also had a meeting to discuss how our detector will look in the future, now we’ve finished the installation of the most recent upgrade.”