  The LHC will be a top-quark factory. With 80 million pairs of top quarks and
an additional 34 million single tops produced annually at the designed high
luminosity, the properties of this particle will be studied to a great
accuracy. The fact that the top quark is the heaviest elementary particle in
the Standard Model with a mass right at the electroweak scale makes it tempting
to contemplate its role in electroweak symmetry breaking, as well as its
potential as a window to unknown new physics at the TeV scale. We summarize the
expectations for top-quark physics at the LHC, and outline new physics
scenarios in which the top quark is crucially involved.
