Inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider : From the Proton to the Higgs Boson

The book aims to explain the historical development of particle physics, with special emphasis on CERN and collider physics. It describes in detail the LHC accelerator and its detectors, describing the science involved as well as the sociology of big collaborations, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs boson. Readers are led step-by-step to understanding why we do particle physics, as well as the tools and problems involved in the field. It provides an insider's view on the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

Mario Campanelli is an experienced researcher who has been associated with CERN for many years. He graduated with honours from the University of Rome in 1995, during which he was a summer student on the L3 experiment at LEP, CERN. In fall 1995, he started his PhD at ETH Zurich and continue working on that experiment at LEP2 during its first years of running. He then took a research position, always at ETH, to work in the neutrino group. In 2001, he took up a long-term research position at University of Geneva to work on the Collider Detector at Fermilab. In spring 2007, he started working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, which is still his main occupation now. In the same year, he also joined University College London as a lecturer, and he is now a reader (associate professor). He is involved in several science outreach activities and has written multiple books on his experience working in CERN.