Heavy Ion Physics with CMS

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will produce heavy ion collisions at the nucleon-nucleon center of mass energy of 5.5 TeV, the highest energy ever available in a controlled environment. This represents an opportunity to study nuclear matter in systems with unprecedented energy densities. Due to the high incident energy, semi-hard and hard processes will be a dominant feature at the LHC. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) heavy-ion program is ideally suited to study the physics of these probes, addressing open questions in the field of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). In this paper an overview of the heavy-ion physics capabilities of the CMS detector is presented.