The electromagnetic and hadron calorimeters make up the center of the 49-foot-high, 69-foot-long Compact Muon Solenoid, an instrument designed to probe the nature of mass itself by finding the elusive Higgs boson particle. Scientists believe the Higgs boson causes mass to exist, and have nicknamed it “the God particle.” These calorimeters measure the energy of particles that fly off after a collision.
The LHC beauty (LHCb) experiment is designed to explain why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe. To do that, LHCb looks at bottom-quarks—superheavy particles four times the mass of a proton—thrown off in proton collisions. The calorimeter measures the energy of particles escaping from the collision, which helps determine their identity.