Rutgers University

 

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory is the world's most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC has had a successful and highly productive Run 2 era (2015-2018), colliding protons with a center-of-mass energy of 13TeV, and breaking data-taking records by collecting an unprecedented amount of data at these high energies. The LHC experiments have an extensive program of searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, exploring uncharted territory at the energy frontier. I will present my personal favorite highlights of the LHC program of new physics searches using the 13 TeV data in Run 2. The LHC will resume operations at an even higher collision energy  of 13.6 TeV starting this summer, and I will summarize the steps taken to further prepare for this exciting new era of particle physics.