2024-06-09 - 2024-06-15
Dominik Mitzel
TU Dortmund
With our current understanding of elementary particle physics, there are many questions that remain unanswered and that point to the existence of yet unknown particles and interactions. LHCb is one of the four main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where decays of heavy and unstable particles are investigated with the aim to find new phenomena which might help solving these open questions.
In this lecture, we will first briefly discuss the theory that describes the known elementary particles and their interactions, as well as its limitations. We will then try to understand how precision studies of particles containing heavy charm or beauty quarks might give hints for new particles, which are much heavier than those that can be directly produced in modern particle physics accelerators. We will touch the topics of rare decays, the different behaviour of particles and antiparticles, as well as the phenomena of periodic particle - antiparticle oscillations. Special focus will be given to particles containing a charm quark.
