Forward look at LHC physics

We provide a brief summary of the potential of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to provide a crucial next step in our understanding of nature. Indeed, the physics potential of the LHC is enormous: among currently approved projects in high energy physics, it uniquely has sufficient energy and luminosity to probe in detail the TeV energy scale relevant to electroweak symmetry breaking. A Higgs boson with standard-model couplings can be studied in detail. It is observable in several decay modes over the full range of currently allowed masses, while its mass and a few of its couplings can be determined. Moreover, if supersymmetry is relevant to electroweak interactions, it will be discovered and the properties of many supersymmetric particles will be studied. Other new physics such as the existence of massive gauge bosons and extra dimensions can be searched for extending the current reach by about an order of magnitude. (37 refs)