LHC: Past, Present, and Future

TL;DR

This paper reviews the first three years of LHC operations, highlighting discoveries like the Higgs boson, and discusses future plans and recent updates in high-energy physics research at the LHC.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of LHC results up to 2013 and discusses the rapid update cycle of experimental findings in high-energy physics.

Findings

Discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012

Initial measurements of the Higgs properties

Preparation for the 13 TeV run in 2015

Abstract

In this overview talk, I give highlights of the first three years of the LHC operations at high energy, spanning heavy-ion physics, standard model measurements, and searches for new particles, which culminated in the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments in 2012. I'll discuss what we found about the properties of the new particle in 10 months since the discovery and then talk about the future LHC program and preparations to the 2015 run at the center-of-mass energy of ~13 TeV. These proceedings are meant to be a snapshot of the LHC results as of May 2013 - the time of the conference. Many of the results shown in these proceedings have been since updated (sometimes significantly) just 4 months thereafter, when these proceedings were due. Nevertheless, keeping this writeup in sync with the results shown in the actual talk has some historical value, as, for one, it tells the reader how short is the turnaround time to update the results at the LHC. To help an appreciation of this fact, I briefly summarize the main changes between May and September 2013 in the Appendix.