Preface

When we started preparing for the School in late 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN had been colliding beams for the first year with fast increasing luminosities. At that time we expected that, in 2011 and 2012, the LHC would provide large data samples such that the LHC experiments would take over the baton of particle physics at the frontier of energy and luminosity from the Tevatron and the B-factories. This made 2012 an opportune time to organise a Summer School with the topic of LHC results and phenomenology. However, the performance of the LHC exceeded all our expectations and, 1 month before the School was held in August 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced the discovery of a Higgs boson, making this result the hot topic of discussion at the School. This set the scene for a very successful 2 weeks. Furthermore, Peter Higgs himself came along to the School and gave a special lecture on how his ideas of electroweak symmetry breaking developed in the 1960s. He also highlighted the difference in the speed of communication now, with instant response available via email compared to taking several weeks via letter. Following the pattern of many recent successful schools, we held the School in St. Andrews in August 2012, using the facilities of the Physics Department and accommodation at University Hall. This location is ideal for a School of this size (70 students and 10 lecturers and other staff) and character. The 70 participants came from 41 institutions, from Europe (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the UK), as well as Brazil, Chile, China, India, Mexico, Turkey and the USA. The aim of the School was to equip young particle physicists with the basic tools to extract the maximum benefit from the various LHC experiments. This was achieved through a series of lectures providing an introduction to the theoretical and phenomenological framework of hadron collisions, and covering the recent results from the LHC. There were also lectures on the tools required by any particle physicist, theoretical or experimental, covering Monte Carlo models of interactions and statistical methods. The lectures were complemented by lively discussion classes covering the topics covered in the lectures and more widely.