  The capabilities of the CMS experiment to explore the rich heavy-ion physics
programme offered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are summarised.
Various representative measurements in Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt(s) = 5.5 TeV
are covered. These include "bulk" observables (charged hadron multiplicity,
low-pT inclusive hadron spectra and elliptic flow) which provide information on
the collective properties of the system; as well as perturbative processes
(high-pT hadrons, jets, gamma-jet and quarkonium production) which yield
"tomographic" information of the densest phases of the reaction.
