High-density QCD with CMS at the LHC

Abstract

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.

Comments: 8 pages, 7 figs. Proceeds plenary talk Quark-Matter'08, Jaipur, India. To appear in J. Phys. G