Dilepton Resonances at High Mass

We present the discovery potential of a heavy new resonance decaying into a pair of leptons with early LHC data with the ATLAS detector. The dilepton final states are robust channels to analyze because of the simplicity of the event topology. The unprecedented available center-of-mass energy will allow one to probe regions that are inaccessible at previous experiments even with modest amounts of data. After studying the Standard Model predictions and the associated uncertainties one can then look for significant deviations as indication of beyond the Standard Model physics (BSM). The focus of the note is to study the prospects for discovering BSM physics in the dilepton final states with an integrated luminosity ranging from 100 pb−1 to 10 fb−1.