On July 4 2022, 10 years will have gone since the announcement made at the CERN Main Auditorium of the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the CERN accelerator LHC (Large Hadron Collider). The discovery of this elementary particle, theoretically predicted in 1964, completes de Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics, formulated in the sixties, which is, undoubted, one the greatest creations in physics developed in the second half of the XX century, as shown by the nearly thirty Nobel Prizes given to its most prestigious protagonists by the Royal Swedish Science Academy, among them François Englert and Peter Higgs in 2013, for inventing the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism of the spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking, establishing the need of the Higgs Boson. The Swedish Academy explicitly recognized the decisive role played by CERN in its decision.

Fundación Ramón Areces wants to pay tribute to this formidable achievement with the organization of two scientific sessions in which the fundamental theoretical developments and the high precision measurements establish the basis for the search will be discussed. The very large scientific diplomacy and technological process leading to the construction of an exceptional infrastructure at CERN, the large hadron collider, will also be discussed, as well as its experimental areas, the systems for the detection of interactions, the storage and processing of large amounts of data, and the development of new highly complex algorithms, allowing the discovery of the Higgs Boson.This discovery is a wonderful milestone in the process of gathering deep knowledge on the microscopic world and a paradigmatic example of talent, stubbornness, determination and ability to overcome a variety of enormous challenges by the community of high energy elementary particle physicists, confirming the undisputed world leadership of CERN this field of fundamental research.  

In this Symposium, the relevant contributions of the Spanish scientific industrial communities to the development of this unique and ambitious adventure of knowledge will also be emphasized.

Christopher Llewellyn-Smith. Genesis of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider)
I will describe the history of the LHC, from first thoughts, through studies of the scientific potential and the evolution of the experimental programme, to the approval and start of construction. As well as the scientific issues, I will describe the difficulty of obtaining the unanimous approval of the CERN Members, not all of whom were enthusiastic, and the negotiations that brought non-European countries into construction of the LHC. I will end by identifying lessons of potential relevance for future projects at CERN.