Exploring the energy frontier at the Large Hadron Collider and beyond

Abstract: The initial years of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been a great success, most notably with the discovery of the Higgs boson. Despite the continued triumph of the Standard Model, critical questions remain unanswered about nature on the smallest scales, such as dark matter and the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. As the most massive of all known elementary particles, the top quark plays a central role in many proposed extensions to the Standard Model that address some of these questions. In this talk, I will discuss the motivation and status of top quark physics at the LHC, presenting recent results from the CMS experiment. Additionally, I will give an outlook on the future upgrade of the LHC to higher luminosities, and the resulting physics potential and experimental challenges.