The Voyage of Discovery of the Higgs Boson at the LHC

The journey in search for the Higgs boson started in earnest with the discovery of the W and Z bosons. The LHC accelerator, the ATLAS and CMS experiments were conceived in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it took two decades to turn the concepts to reality. Novel and innovative technologies needed to be developed and turned into superbly functioning engines for providing proton-proton collisions in the case of the LHC and physics results in the case of the experiments. The most significant discovery so far to emerge from the LHC project is that of a heavy scalar boson, announced on 4th July 2012. The data collected so far point strongly to its properties as those expected for the Higgs boson associated with the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism.