Chertok Lecture: Claudio Campagnari, "Physics at the Large Hadron Collider"

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, colliding protons at energies that probe the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces that govern them. Its crowning achievement — the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson — completed the Standard Model and confirmed the mechanism by which elementary particles acquire mass. Yet many deep questions remain: What is dark matter? Why is there more matter than antimatter? Are there forces or particles beyond those we know? I will review the original motivations for building the LHC, illustrate the key results that have been obtained so far, and touch upon the plans for the future. Technical details will be kept to a minimum in an effort to make the presentation accessible for non experts.