Experimental Challenges at the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider ( LHC) at CERN will provide proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV with a design luminosity of 10**34/ cm**2/ s. The exploitation of the rich physics potential offered by the LHC will be illustrated using the expected performance of the two general--purpose detectors ATLAS and CMS. The detector design requirements necessary to extract the physics under the challenging experimental conditions at the LHC are discussed. This is followed by an analysis of search methods for the Higgs sector and the detection of supersymmetric particles.