Future of the ATLAS heavy ion program

The primary goal of the heavy ion program at the LHC is to study the properties of deconfined strongly interacting matter, often referred to as ``quark-gluon plasma'' (QGP), created in ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions. That matter is found to be strongly coupled with a viscosity to entropy ratio near a conjectured quantum lower bound. ATLAS foresees a rich program of studies using jets, Upsilons, measurements of global event properties and measurements in proton-nucleus collisions that will measure fundamental transport properties of the QGP, probe the nature of the interactions between constituents of the QGP, elucidate the origin of the strong coupling, and provide insight on the initial state of nuclear collisions. The heavy ion program through the third long shutdown should provide one inverse nb of 5.5~TeV Pb+Pb data. That data will provide more than an order of magnitude increase in statistics over currently available data for high-pT observables such as gamma-jet and Z-jet pairs. However, potentially sensitive high-pT final-states will remain statistically challenged and would require additional data-taking beyond the third long shutdown should the physics case for the measurements be proven to have sufficient merit.