ABSTRACT
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will ultimately collide protons with a total Centre of Mass (CM) system energy of 14 TeV, and will open up a new high energy frontier. Initially the energy will be lower, however. The commissioning phase of the LHC in 2009 included collisions at a CM energy of 900 GeV, and 2.36 TeV. About half a million events with all the main subdetectors on have been recorded by the experiments at 900 GeV, and a few 10,000 events have been collected at 2.36 TeV, just before the short winter shutdown of the LHC and the experiments. In 2010 and 2011 the LHC ran at a CM energy of 7 TeV. In the next few years and after adding some modifications to the machine, the design energy of 14 TeV or close to this could be reached.
