Inside an insulating vacuum chamber in a tunnel about 100 meters below the surface of the Franco-Swiss plain near Geneva, packets of protons whirl around the 27-km circumference of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a speed close to that of light, colliding every 25 nanoseconds at four beam crossings. The products of these collisions, of which hundreds of billions will be produced each second, are observed and measured with the most advanced particle-detection technology, capable of tracking individual particles as they generate a signature track during its passage through the detectors. All this information is captured, filtered and piped to huge networks of microprocessors for analysis and study by an international team of physicists. When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes on line in 2009, it will be the largest scientific experiment ever constructed, and the data it produces will lead to a new understanding of our universe. Many thousands of scientists and engineers were behind the planning and construction of this marvelous machine; a few key members of this team have agreed to write about their role in this adventure, with the common goal of revealing the LHC to a broader readership: its fundamental technology; the basics of the theory behind the experiments; the challenges in planning and civil engineering; the four key experiments; and the informatics infrastructure that will channel the data to the workstations of scientists around the world.

Book contributors: Lyndon Evans, John Ellis, Jean-Luc Baldy, Luz Anastasia Lopez-Hernandez, John A. Osborne, Anders Unnervik, Lucio Rossi, Ezio Todesco, Pierre Strubin, Cristoforo Benvenuti, Philippe Lebrun, Laurent Tavian, Volker Mertens, Brennan Goddard, Trevor Linnecar, Tejinder Virdee, Peter Jenni, Tatsuya Nakada, Jürgen Schukraft, Chris Fabjan, Les Robertson, John Harvey, and Pere Mato.

The Large Hadron Collider: An Introduction - The Fundamental Physics Behind the LHC - The Construction of the LHC - Civil Engineering Highlights - Lessons in Big Science Management and Contracting - The Technology of the LHC - Superconducting Magnets - The LHC and its Vacuum Technology - The Cryogenics Challenge of the LHC - Moving the Beam into and out of the LHC - Capturing, Accelerating and Holding the Beam - The LHC Experiments - Particle Detection at the LHC: An Introduction - The Compact Muon Spectrometer - ATLAS - The LHCB Experiment - ALICE - LHC Data Analysis and the Grid

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