Heavy Ion Physics at the LHC

Abstract

The ion-ion center of mass energies at the LHC will exceed that at RHIC by nearly a factor of 30, providing exciting opportunities for addressing unique physics issues in a completely new energy domain. Some highlights of this new physics domain are presented here. We briefly describe how these collisions will provide new insights into the high density, low momentum gluon content of the nucleus expected to dominate the dynamics of the early state of the system. We then discuss how the dense initial state of the nucleus affects the lifetime and temperature of the produced system. Finally, we explain how the high energy domain of the LHC allows abundant production of `rare' processes, hard probes calculable in perturbative quantum chromodynamics, QCD. At the LHC, high momentum jets and $b \bar b$ bound states, the $\Upsilon$ family, will be produced with high statistics for the first time in heavy ion collisions.