The ‘Large Hadron Collider’, LHC, is in preparation at CERN. Proton–proton collisions at energies of up to 14 TeV will probe the laws of the fundamental interactions at effective energies of 1 TeV or higher. At these energies, today’s ‘Standard Model’ predicts the observation of new fundamental processes. Furthermore, this description may have to be expanded to a more global theory. The discovery potential of the LHC, some of the technological challenges of this superconducting machine, and the experimental research are described.