  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.
