The Heavy Ion Physics Program with ATLAS at the LHC

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