Heavy ion physics with the ATLAS detector at LHC
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) now under construction at European Center
for Nuclear Research (CERN) is an exciting discovery machine starting its
operation in 2007. It will be able to run proton-proton collision with 
unprecedentedly high energy of 7 TeV/proton, as well as Pb-Pb collisions 
with 5.5 TeV/nucleon.

The ATLAS detector is initially designed to study high pT physics in 
proton-proton collisions at high luminosity of the LHC machine, however 
most of its subsystems will be available for the study of heavy ion collisions.
Even in central Pb-Pb reactions the silicon strip layers and especially pixel
detectors will be capable to provide a reasonable tracking capability.
The muon spectrometer can be used for efficient muon identification 
and b-jet tagging using soft decay muons.

One of the highlights of the ATLAS detector is its calorimeter system. 
It has the best granularity and hadronic energy resolution compared to 
other LHC detectors and will be well suited for jet quenching studies.

In this talk we report on an assessment of the baseline ATLAS detector 
capabilities to explore the physics of heavy ion collisions. 
The ATLAS sensitivity to some expected signatures of quark-gluon plasma 
(e.g. jet quenching, heavy-quarkonia suppression) will be discussed.