The challenges of LHC

My objective in these lectures is to highlight some of the experimental challenges at LHC and to illustrate how the general-purpose detectors have been adapted to meet these challenges. Some of the challenges result from the parameters of the LHC machine, others from the physics that one wants to do. I shall cover general aspects of the design of the detectors (e.g. why they are so big) and also technology aspects (e.g. why specific kinds of detectors have been chosen). Where relevant to the discussion, I shall touch on aspects of detector physics, although without going into much detail.