LHCb is orientated around the beam but offset to one side of the collision point. It thus collects collision data from 'glancing' collisions or those in which light particles are produced. In particular, millions of B mesons (subatomic particles containing b-quarks) will be sprayed into LHCb every second. The primary goal of LHCb is to shed light on why the universe is so full of matter and contains hardly any anti-matter. There is clearly an assymmetry since if matter and anti-matter were equal we would long ago have vanished in a flash of light. But we don't yet know why. LHCb hopes to answer this question by studying B and anti-B mesons.

The Alice experiment will examine nucleus-nucleus interactions at LHC energies and study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where the formation of a new phase of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, is expected.