Not all the experiments in high energy physics are equal. There are some that have a two dozen
collaborators -for example the BNL e766- and others that have close to two thousand
collaborators -for example the ATLAS of the CERN-. They are multimillion and multinational projects
that group some universities and centers of investigation from many places of the world. The
central part of those experiments is the particle detector designed to study
determined region of energy and determined final state. For example exclusive 
reactions,
production of 
in collisions 
, search of the 
quark, search of the 
-or god particle as Lederman calls it-, and others. For they have different objective
of investigation, the detectors have different form and different size -some have the form
of a cube of close 4 meters of edge (like the BNL e766 detector) and others have a very large form
of a few square meters of cross section and some hundred meters large-; even they share
basically the same elements distributed in different form in the volume of the detector. Some elements are:
The magnets to curve the trajectories of the charged particles, multiwire proportional chambers to
reconstruct the trajectories of the charged particles, scintillator detectors to sense the pass
of charged particles, ultra high electronics to process and store automatically the
information delivered by the detectors and the computarized systems.
The best way to familiarize with those detectors is working with them; however on lacking them physically, we can learn many things from the good books. See for example the References 5 and 7. Also the www pages of Fermilab, CERN, SLAC, and DESY. There each experiment has its own page. The experiments, and their physical characteristics, the physical topics of study, the personnel, the publications, etc. are there described.
Some concrete example of detectors are shown in the next section.
We describe the main modern detectors used in the experimental high energy physics. The scintillator detectors, the multiwire proportional chambers, and the Cerenkov detectors. We will show their physical principles. Besides we will delineate the Monte Carlo technique and its use in the experimental high energy physics.