The Large Hadron Collider: The Big Bang Machine

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, has started its operation end of 2009, and has just completed its first physics run in 2010. The LHC is one of the largest and most complex scientific instruments ever built by mankind. Head-on collisions of protons from the two beams that circulate in opposite directions with each an energy of the protons of 3.5 TeV initially have been produced. In these collisions energy is converted into matter and we expect to produce and see for the first time new heavy particles which have lived only very shortly after the Big Bang. Additionally, at the end of the year lead-lead collisions were produced, to study the state of matter at very early times of the Universe. This presentation will discuss a summary of the LHC operation and its main experiments, highlights of the first physics results from the 2010 data, and the schedule of expected operation in the near future. The physics highlights will contain the rediscovery and measurements of the production of known heavy particles such as the W,Z bosons and the top quark, studies of the strong force - with a surprising novel effect seen in high multiplicity events--, searches for physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, and the first results from the heavy ion collisions at the LHC energies. We'll conclude with the near future prospects for the search of the Higgs particle, the search for a Supersymmetric world and the search for Extra Space Time Dimensions. The findings at the LHC experiment may well create a revolution in our understanding of the elementary building blocks of matter and the forces that rule them.