Experimental Facilities at the High Energy Frontier

TL;DR

This paper reviews the experimental efforts at hadron colliders, especially the LHC, highlighting the technological and scientific progress leading to the Higgs discovery and discussing future high-energy frontier facilities.

Contribution

It provides a physics-motivated overview of experimental aspects at the LHC and beyond, emphasizing lessons learned and future prospects.

Findings

Successful LHC experiments built on previous detector experience

Key experimental techniques enabled Higgs boson discovery

Future upgrades and facilities are outlined for continued exploration

Abstract

The main theme of the lectures covered the experimental work at hadron colliders, with a clear focus on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and on the roadmap that led finally to the discovery of the Higgs boson. The lectures were not a systematic course on machine and detector technologies, but rather tried to give a physics-motivated overview of many experimental aspects that were all relevant for making the discovery. The actual lectures covered a much broader scope than what is documented here in this writeup. The successful concepts for the experiments at the LHC have benefitted from the experience gained with previous generations of detectors at lower-energy machines. The lectures included also an outlook to the future experimental programme at the LHC, with its machine and experiments upgrades, as well as a short discussion of possible facilities at the high energy frontier beyond LHC.