The Higgs Boson in the Standard Model - From LEP to LHC: Expectations, Searches, and Discovery of a Candidate

The quest for the Higgs boson of the Standard Model, which was a cornerstone in the physics programme at particle colliders operating at the energy frontier for several decades, is the subject of this review. After reviewing the formulation of electroweak symmetry breaking via the Higgs mechanism within the Standard Model, the phenomenology of the Higgs boson at colliders and the theoretical and phenomenological constraints on the Standard Model Higgs sector are discussed. General remarks on experimental searches and the methodology of statistical interpretation are followed by a description of the phenomenology of Higgs-boson production and the corresponding precise predictions. The strategies of the experimental searches and their findings are discussed for the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) at CERN, the proton-antiproton collider Tevatron at Fermilab, and the proton-proton Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The article concludes with the description of the observation of a Higgs-like boson at the LHC.