After decades of a meticulous preparation and efforts from the scientific community, we are now exploring the laws of nature at a new energy frontier. By the dawn of 2013, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, the most extraordinary particle accelerator mankind has ever made, will be concluding the first phase of its operation, the success of which culminated in the discovery of a new particle, the Higgs boson.

The physics laws for elementary particles are a delicate composition of elegant and profound ideas in physics: quantum theory, theory of relativity, field theory, symmetry and locality. All our attempts to formulate theories which agree with past experiments on weak interactions (responsible for radioactivity), lead to inevitable predictions of novel particles and novel forces.

The LHC has a singular capability to measure precisely rare effects in electroweak processes and to discover new phenomena which will guide us to an elevated theoretical understanding of fundamental interactions.

The progress of the LHC program has been rapid. In 2011, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations detected an impressive number of collisions and engaged in searches of new physics effects in numerous experimental signatures. The LHC operation resumed in 2012 at a higher collision energy than in 2011, with the exploration of uncharted energy regimes and the riveting hunt for the Higgs boson that led to its celebrated discovery in July 2012. Having completed its flagship search, the experiment marches towards an era of higher precision and potential further discoveries.

The Latsis Symposium of ETH Zurich is a prestigious annual event under the auspices of the Latsis foundation. The 2013 symposium is a four days event that brings together leading experts and rising stars from the world of particle physics to discuss the fundamental laws of nature at the new energy frontier explored by the Large Hadron Collider.