High-density QCD with CMS at the LHC

The capabilities of the CMS experiment to explore the rich heavy-ion physics programme offered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are summarised. Various representative measurements in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt(s)$ = 5.5 TeV are covered. These include "bulk" observables -- charged hadron multiplicity, low-$p_{T}$ inclusive hadron spectra and elliptic flow -- which provide information on the collective properties of the system; as well as perturbative processes -- high-$p_{T}$ hadrons, jets, $\gamma$-jet and quarkonia production -- which yield "tomographic" information of the densest phases of the reaction.