LHC detectors: commissioning and early physics

After a machine-commissioning phase in summer 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), 27 km long, at CERN (Geneva/Switzerland) will begin colliding protons at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, becoming the world's highest energy particle collider. The main goals of the LHC are the search for the Higgs boson, the last particle remaining undiscovered of the standard model of particle physics, and the search for physics 'beyond the standard model'. This report summarizes the commissioning challenges of the major experiments and highlights some of the early physics prospects of the LHC.