Heavy-Ion Physics with CMS

This article presents a brief overview of the CMS experiment capabilities to study the hot and dense matter created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The CERN Large Hadron Collider will provide collisions of Pb nuclei at 5.5 TeV per nucleon. The CMS heavy ion group has developed a plethora of physics analyses addressing many important aspects of heavy-ion physics in preparation for a competitive and successful program.