Physics at the LHC: a short overview

The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started operation a few months ago. The machine will deliver proton-proton and nucleus-nucleus collisions at energies as high as = 14 TeV and luminosities up to ~ 1034 cm−2s−1 never reached before. The main open scientific questions that the seven LHC experiments - ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb, TOTEM, LHCf and MOEDAL - aim to solve in the coming years are succinctly reviewed.

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