  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will provide proton-proton collisions
at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV with a design luminosity of
10**34/cm**2/s. The exploitation of the rich physics potential offered by the
LHC will be illustrated using the expected performance of the two
general--purpose detectors ATLAS and CMS. The detector design requirements
necessary to extract the physics under the challenging experimental conditions
at the LHC are discussed. This is followed by an analysis of search methods for
the Higgs sector and the detection of supersymmetric particles.
