New opportunities in heavy ion physics at HL-LHC with a MIP Timing Detector at the CMS experiment

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is undergoing an extensive Phase II upgrade program to prepare for the challenging conditions of the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). A new timing layer is designed to measure minimum ionizing particles (MIP) with a time resolution of $\sim$ 30 ps and hermetic coverage up to a pseudo-rapidity of $|\eta|$ = 3. The precise time information from the MIP timing detector (MTD) will serve as an excellent time-of-flight detector for particle identification in QCD and heavy-ion physics. Together with the wide coverage of tracker and calorimetry, the MTD will enable a broad range of new and unique opportunities in heavy-ion physics at CMS. We present the current status and ongoing R&D of the MTD and performance of extending heavy-ion physics program at CMS with particle identification, focusing on measurements involving hard probes such as heavy flavor hadron reconstruction over wide rapidity down to a very low transverse momentum, correlations of jets and identified hadrons.