LHCb
The Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) detector is designed to answer a specific question: where did all the anti-matter go?
Equal amounts of matter and its counterpart anti-matter were created in the Big Bang. But today we find no evidence of, for example, anti-matter galaxies or stars. The LHCb seeks to solve this mystery by studying a type of particle called the "beauty quark".
ATLAS
One of the general purpose detectors which has found evidence of a new particle matching the elusive Higgs boson.
Atlas has an enormous doughnut-shaped magnet system, consisting of eight 25m-long (82ft) superconducting magnet coils arranged into a cylinder, which can collide protons that have been accelerated to fantastic energies.
Atlas is also looking for extra dimensions of space, microscopic black holes, and evidence for dark matter.
ALICE
While the other large Hadron Collider detectors use proton beams to do their science, ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) relies on smashing together electrically charged lead atoms.
Scientists are aiming to recreate a "liquid" state of matter called quark-gluon plasma, which existed just after the Big Bang when the early Universe was still extremely hot. They are then studying the cooling plasma in the hope of discovering how particles are born.
CMS
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general purpose detector with which scientists believe they have found evidence of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The detector is built around a huge solenoid magnet - a cylindrical coil of superconducting cable which generates a magnetic field about 100,000 times as strong as the Earth's.
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