The Status and Physics Potential of the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European center for high energy research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, has been designed to collide protons with the highest center of mass energies (s = 14 TeV) and luminosities (up to 1034 cm-2 s-1) for any particle collider to date. The main physics goal at this accelerator and its two multi-purpose experiments ATLAS and CMS is the discovery of the Standard Model Higgs boson, which is expected within an integrated luminosity [' dt = 10 fb-1, or the first three years of collisions, in the mass range of 115-180 GeV. In addition, measurements of Standard Model parameters like the W boson mass mW and top quark mass mt are possible at high precision, with dmW'15 MeV and dmt'1 GeV. Illumination of new, yet unexplored kinematic domains in proton-proton collisions allows exploration of an enormous parameter space of new physics models beyond the Standard Model, including a possible early discovery of supersymmetry within [' dt = 1 fb-1.