The challenge of LHC experiments

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC at CERN will provide protonproton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV with a design luminosity of 1034cm - 2s - 1. The exploitation of the rich physics potential ordered 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, using the search for the Higgs boson as an example. 20 Refs.