The Large Hadron Collider and the role of superconductivity in one of the largest scientific enterprises

After ten years of R&D and industrialization and seven years of construction, the LHC is near completion. The manufacture of the 1750 main superconducting magnets and of the 8000 superconducting correctors for the accelerator, as well as their cold test at CERN, is approaching the end, while their commissioning in the 27 km-long tunnel has started. The very large superconducting magnets for the main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, are installed and their commissioning is under way. Superconductivity is the key technology for the largest scientific enterprise of this decade: it accounts for half of the total cost and has proved to be affordable and reliable. Thanks to superconductivity we can probe new states of matters and reproduce conditions of 1 ps after the big bang. The paper will give the link between the Physics requirements and the answers that applied superconductivity has offered in this project.