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At the Large Hadron Collider, collisions between beams of protons create particles known as ‘beauty (b) quarks’ that were common in the aftermath of the Big Bang. They are generated along with their antimatter counterparts, anti-beauty quarks. 'b' and 'anti-b' quarks are unstable and short-lived, decaying rapidly into a range of other particles. The LHCb experiment compares these decays, with the goal of gaining useful clues as to why nature prefers matter over antimatter.Author:LHCb collaboration/CERN