Heavy Ion Physics at the ATLAS Detector

The ATLAS detector is one of the two large detectors built to carry on high pT physics at the Large Hadron Collider. The detector is designed to perform optimally at the challenging nominal LHC machine luminosity of 10^34 cm-2s-1. ATLAS has a finely segmented electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters covering 10 units of rapidity. The inner tracking system is composed of sicilicon pixel detector, silicon central tracker, transition radiation tracker and a 2T solenoidal magnet, covering 5 units of rapidity. The muon spectrometer is located outside the calorimeter volume. Muon chambers and air core toroids are used to track muons of momentum larger than 4 GeV. The ATLAS detector has a superb performance for jet physics because of its calorimeters. Simulation studies also indicate that it will be possible to tag b-jets in the heavy ion environment. Upsilon and J/Psi can be reconstructed through the di-muon decay channel. The detector is ideal for the study of global variables, namely total energy flow and particle production multiplicity. We will discuss in some detail the ATLAS detector and its expected performance in the study of proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions.