Heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider have produced the hottest densest matter ever created in a laboratory setting.  In these collisions a novel phase of matter is formed governed by QCD interactions in which the degrees of freedom are thought to be quarks and gluons.  The color neutral Z boson is an excellent probe of the matter produced in heavy ion collisions. Because it does not interact with the dense color matter, the Z boson provides a clean test of our understanding of the collision.  In particular, the production rate of Z bosons is found to be proportional to the number of binary collisions between nucleons in each nuclei collisions.  Further, Z bosons correlated with jets allow us to gauge the medium's effect on color sensitive jets relative to the unbiased Z bosons.  The first precision study of Z bosons in heavy ion collisions, measured using the ATLAS experiment, will be presented.