How a huge HEP experiment is designed: course

More than twenty years after the idea of building the LHC machine was discussed in a workshop in Lausanne in 1984 for the first time, it is instructive to look back on the historical process which has led the community to where we are today with four huge detectors being commissioned and eagerly awaiting first beam collisions in 2008. The main design principles, detector features and performance characteristics of the ATLAS and CMS detectors will be briefly covered in these two lectures with, as an interlude, a wonderful DVD from ATLAS outreach depicting how particles interact and are detected in the various components of the experiments.