Heinemann

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built in the past decade near Geneva at the border of Switzerland and France, and is now operating since last year at the world's highest energy. A primary objective of the LHC is to either discover or dispute the so-called Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was first hypothesized nearly 50 years ago in 1964 in order to find a mechanism by which all particles that make up the matter in our Universe acquire mass. Just in the last year the LHC has made significant  progress in its search for the Higgs boson. Particularly at the end of 2011 initial search results were observed that show tantalizing hints that a discovery might be in reach. This has caused excitement within the scientific community and the popular press. In this colloquium I will describe the current state of the experimental searches for the Higgs boson searches and give an outlook towards next year.