The Large Hadron Collider Project: status, highlight results and future prospect

More than two years after starting to deliver the highest man-made
particle collision energies ever, the Large Hadron Collider at the
European Laboratory for particle phyiscs, CERN, has provided a whealth
of data which opened new windows into the physics at and beyond the
TeV scale, or - equivalently - to the physics of the very early
universe only 10^(-15) seconds after the big bang. In this
presentation, the structure of the LHC and the experiments as well as
the status and long-term plans for this project will be reported.  The
main focus will be on presenting highlights of the phyiscs results
obtained so far, including the status of the first signals which may
constitute observation of the long-sought, elusive Higgs Boson, the
missing piece of the current standard theory of particle physics.