Heavy ion physics at the LHC

The paper begins with a review of the present knowledge about the properties of hadronic matter at high temperature, where the gas of hadrons converts into a quark-gluon plasma characterized by the absence of quark confinement and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. The next section discusses possible experimental probes of this new form of matter. The author then describes how hot, equilibrated matter is formed in nuclear collisions and how it disassembles into individual hadrons, which are observed in experiments (Harris and Muller 1996). Finally, an overview of the insights gathered in the first three years of the RHIC heavy ion programme will be presented.