In 2012, more than 30 years after it was first theoretically proposed, the Higgs Boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider by the ATLAS and CMS experiments. This course will cover the basics of the collider and the experiments in two parts. The lecture will discuss the details of the collider itself, particle detection in ATLAS and CMS, and the experimental challenges behind discovering the HIggs. The practical session will allow you to discover the Higgs yourself. Using simulations of the ATLAS detector and the ROOT program, which is the standard graphics program used in high energy physics and other fields, you will select possible Higgs candidate events and try to distinguish these Higgs events from background events.
