Chapter 4: Overview of the Large Hadron Collider and of the ATLAS and CMS experiments

The Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. It has allowed the discovery of a Higgs boson with mass near 125 GeV in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments. This chapter provides first an overview of the main characteristics of this collider, as well as a short description of the two general purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, which discovered in 2012 a Higgs boson with mass close to 125 GeV. This is followed by a summary of the main aspects of particle identification and reconstruction by these two detectors, together with a short presentation of the main analysis tools used to extract the LHC results of the Higgs boson(s) searches and measurements.