Bochum 2009 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Hadronen und Kerne

HK 22: Plenary IV

HK 22.1: Invited Plenary Talk

Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 11:00–11:45, Audi-Max

LHC Experiments and Physics — •Peter Jenni — CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

After more than 15 years of design and construction efforts the LHC and its experiments are finally starting operation. Besides the giant accelerator, which is installed in a ring tunnel of 27 km length about 100 m underground, the not less impressive and complex detectors are ready for data taking. In this talk the status and the physics expectations of the three pp experiments ATLAS, CMS and LHCb will be reviewed (note that the heavy ion programme and its dedicated experiment ALICE will be covered separately). The LHC will allow them to explore fundamental physics questions like: why have particles a mass, what is the non-visible dark matter in the Universe, are there more than four dimensions in Nature, what are the smallest building blocks of matter? The expectations for new discoveries are high, since decades physicists are eagerly awaiting this exploratory step into unknown territory.