Physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

Currently under construction at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC will be the highest energy collider in the world upon its completion in 2006. It collides two proton beams at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV. The LHC provides excellent opportunities to discover the Higgs boson, a key prediction of the Standard Model that will lead to fundamental understanding of the origin of mass. The new energy realm opened up by the LHC could also yield unexpected discoveries, paving the way toward our understanding of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.