Dr Tara Shears is a member of the Particle Physics Group at the University of Liverpool. She and her colleagues have played a key role in building the biggest, most expensive, most complicated scientific instrument in history – The Large Hadron Collider or LHC. In these films, Tara explains her work and the science behind it.

B is for Beauty

Tara shows us around her lab, where she and her colleagues have been making components for the LHCb detector.

The Matter with Antimatter

Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created at the birth of the universe but there’s very little antimatter around today. Tara explains why this is one of the greatest mysteries in science and how it might be solved by the biggest experiment in history.

The Mystery of the Missing Mass

Tara explains why scientists think that most of the mass in the universe is made up of something we can’t see and how the Large Hadron Collider might finally tell us exactly what this mysterious “Dark Matter” is.

Sizing Things Up

An animated zoom in from the outer edges of the universe to the centre of an atom. Tara explains how one of science’s greatest achievements is to have accurately measured everything from the size of the universe to the diameter of a quark and how all these things are connected by the Big Bang.

Hunting for the Higgs

Tara enlists the help of students from the University of Liverpool to explain what the Higgs Boson is and why scientists have built the biggest, most complicated experiment in history to prove it exists

These films were all funded by a grant from The Science and Technology Facilities Council.