Heavy Ions in ATLAS

The ATLAS experiment is designed to study proton-proton collisions at the LHC. This paper reports on an evaluation of the ATLAS potential for heavy-ion physics. Most of the detectors retain nearly their full capability even in the presence of high-multiplicity soft background from nucleus-nucleus collisions. These studies show that, in addition to "day-one" measurements such as global observables and elliptic flow, heavy-quarkonia suppression and jet quenching, which are crucial probes to study the formation of a quark-gluon plasma, are accessible in ATLAS.