The Heavy-Ion Physics Programme with the ATLAS Detector

The CERN LHC will collide lead ions at sqrt(s)=5.5 TeV per nucleon pair and will provide crucial information about the formation of a quark gluon plasma at the highest temperatures and densities ever created in the laboratory. We report on an updated evaluation of the ATLAS potential to study heavy-ion physics. The ATLAS detector will perform especially well for high pT phenomena even in the presence of the high-multiplicity soft background expected from lead-lead collisions, and most of the detector subsystems retain their nearly full capability. ATLAS will study a full range of observables which characterize the hot and dense medium formed in heavy-ion collisions. In addition to global measurements such as particle multiplicities and collective flow, heavy-quarkonia suppression, jet quenching and the modification of jets passing in the dense medium will be accessible to ATLAS. ATLAS will also study forward physics and ultraperipheral collisions using Zero Degree Calorimeters.