  The first Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at sqrts_NN =
5.52 TeV are imminent. Heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide an extended
energy lever arm to the existing measurements made at RHIC and SPS, especially
in hard (large-Q^2) processes. In this contribution an overview of the ATLAS
detector is given and the current physics focus of Heavy Ion Working Group is
discussed.
