The Large Hadron Collider of CERN and the roadmap toward higher performance

The Large Hadron Collider is exploring the new frontier of particle physics. It is the largest and most ambitious scientific instrument ever built and 100 years after the Rutherford experiment it continues that tradition of “smashing atoms” to unveil the secret of the infinitely small. LHC makes use of all what we learnt in 40 years of hadron colliders, in particular of ISR and Sp-pbarS at CERN and Tevatron at Fermilab, and it is based on Superconductivity, discovered also 100 years ago. Designing, developing the technology, building and finally commissioning the LHC took more than twenty years. While LHC is now successfully running, we are already preparing the future for the next step. First, by increasing of a factor five the LHC luminosity in ten years from now, and then by increasing its energy by a factor two or more, on the horizon of the next twenty years. These LHC upgrades, in luminosity and energy, will be the super-exploitation of the CERN infrastructure and is the best investment that the HEP community can make in order to extend the boundary of our knowledge at an affordable cost.