The LHCb Experiment

Abstract

We present an overview including the historical motivation, design principles, and experimental methodology of the LHCb experiment. Originally conceived as a dedicated experiment for CP violation and rare decays in the B-meson sector, LHCb evolved into a general-purpose experiment for physics in the forward direction at the LHC, while maintaining its core optimization on flavour physics. We review the key detector components for both the original LHCb set-up as well as its upgrade, with emphasis on design features that enable efficient reconstruction of forward-region events. Experimental techniques specific to the forward spectrometer are discussed, highlighting how detailed detector information is translated into event-level observables used in physics analyses. We present an overview of LHCb's major physics results on CP violation, rare decays, spectroscopy, long-lived particles, W- and Z-boson physics and heavy ion physics. In all cases we focus on the conceptual methods, while referring to the literature for detailed discussions. We end this review by comparing LHCb's performance to other experiments and shortly present the concept for a future, second upgrade of LHCb at the High Luminosity LHC.