Exploring the energy frontier with deep inelastic scattering at the LHC

A proposal is described for complementing the intense, high energy proton and ion beams of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with a novel electron energy recovery linac (ERL) to provide a next generation electron-hadron collider facility of more than 1 TeV center-of-mass energy. This Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) will substantially extend the kinematic range covered by the first ep collider, HERA, and surpass its luminosity by a factor of several hundreds. This configuration will be a microscope for the substructure of matter with unprecedentedly clean resolution and a facility for new physics in the Higgs, strong interaction and electroweak sector with a strong discovery potential. The paper also describes the accelerator design and its main characteristics. As such it had been submitted to the deliberations on the future of European particle physics.