The LHC accelerator will accelerate particles to the highest energy ever achieved in a laboratory. The LHCb detector will register the collisions between these particles, in particular collisions between pairs of anti-beauty and beauty quarks. It will record billion pairs of anti-beauty and beauty per year extremely precisely. Its goal: to detect a bigger asymmetry that will help explain how it is that nature prefers matter to antimatter.
More about the Physics of LHCb
Despite being very big and heavy, the LHCb detector is a high-precision instrument based on the latest cutting-edge technology. The size comes from that fact that, at a closer look, it actually consists of several different types of sub-detectors, each one specialized in measuring a different aspect of what happens in the particle collisions. As a whole, the detector provides information about the trajectory, the identity, the momentum and the energy of each particle produced in the collisions. Each sub-detector is also very big in order to make precise measurements of the extremely fast and energetic particles that are produced.
More about the subdetectors: Velo and Magnet
More about the subdetectors: RICH and ECAL
This information has been taken from: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/828992
More information: http://lhcb.web.cern.ch/lhcb/