  One of the major goals of the Large Hadron Collider is to probe the
electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism and the generation of the masses of the
elementary particles. We review the physics of the Higgs sector in the Standard
Model and some of its extensions such as supersymmetric theories and models of
extra dimensions. The prospects for discovering the Higgs particles at the LHC
and the study of their fundamental properties are summarised.
