Relativistic heavy ion collisions are used to create and study the strongly
interacting Quark Gluon Plasma (sQGP), the primordial state of matter where
quarks and gluons are deconfined. The heavy ion program at the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) at CERN started in the fall of 2010 with Pb+Pb collisions at a
collision energy of 2.76 TeV (per nucleon), opening a new energy frontier in
the study of the sQGP. The wealth of high quality results produced by the LHC
experiments in two relatively short runs will be reviewed and discussed in
light of the knowledge gained over the last decade at the Relativistic Heavy
Ion Collider (RHIC), focusing on the quantitative and qualitative differences
between the energy regimes of these two facilities.