The Large Hadron Collider Project

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), approved by the CERN Council in December 1994, will be the premiere research tool at the energy frontier of particle physics. It will provide proton-proton collisions with a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV and an unprecedented luminosity of 1034 cm-2 s-1. The most critical technologies of the LHC are the superconducting magnet system, with a dipole field above 8 Tesla, and the huge cryogenic system operating at below 2 K needed to achieve such high fields. A brief overview of the project is presented and the main technological challenges are discussed.