The Large Hadron Collider: The Big Bang machine

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, has started its operation. Head-on collisions of protons from the two beams that circulate in opposite directions, with each an energy of the protons of 3.5 TeV, are now studied by the experiments. In these collisions, energy is converted into matter and we expect to produce and see for the first time new heavy particles, which have lived only very shortly after the Big Bang. I will give a summary of the LHC operation and its main experiments, and highlight the search for new particles and phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, with the most recent data collected by the experiments. Examples include the search for the illustrious Higgs particle, the search for a Supersymmetric world and possible candidate new particles for dark matter, and the search for Extra Space Time Dimensions. The findings at the LHC experiments in the next years may well create a revolution in our understanding of the elementary building blocks of matter and the forces that rule them.