What is LHC ?

During LHC operations, the CERN site draws roughly 200 MW of electrical power from the French electrical grid, which, for comparison, is about one-third the energy consumption of the city of Geneva; the LHC accelerator and detectors draw about 120 MW thereof.

Seven detectors have been constructed at the LHC, located underground in large caverns excavated at the LHC's intersection points.

Two of them, the ATLAS experiment and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), are large general-purpose particle detectors.

ALICE and LHCb have more specific roles and the last three, TOTEM, MoEDAL and LHCf, are very much smaller and are for very specialized research.

The ATLAS and CMS experiments discovered the Higgs boson, which is strong evidence that the Standard Model has the correct mechanism of giving mass to elementary particles.