The LHC project

Abstract The construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its associated experiments is well advanced. Novel superconducting technology is used to achieve the collider's unprecedented centre-of-mass energy. Two general-purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, will search for the Higgs particle, which has not yet been convincingly observed, and study other unsolved aspects of the Standard Model. LHC will produce ion–ion collisions, for which a dedicated experiment, ALICE, is being built. LHCb is a forward collider detector to study CP violation and other phenomena in Beauty particle decays. TOTEM, partially housed inside CMS, will study physics in the very forward direction. MOEDAL, in the LHCb pit, is proposed to search for monopoles and other highly ionising exotic particles.