  The next great energy frontier in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions is
quickly approaching with the completion of the Large Hadron Collider and the
ATLAS experiment is poised to make important contributions in understanding QCD
matter at extreme conditions. While designed for high-pT measurements in
high-energy p+p collisions, the detector is well suited to study many aspects
of heavy ion collisions from bulk phenomena to high-pT and heavy flavor
physics. With its large and finely segmented electromagnetic and hadronic
calorimeters, the ATLAS detector excels in measurements of photons and jets,
observables of great interest at the LHC. In this talk, we highlight the
performance of the ATLAS detector for Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC with special
emphasis on a key feature of the ATLAS physics program: jet and direct photon
measurements.
