Dilepton searches with ATLAS

We present the discovery potential of heavy new resonances decaying into dilepton pairs with early LHC data using 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 were simply inaccessible at previous experiments even with modest amounts of data. After studying the Standard Model predictions and the associated uncertainties, one can look for significant deviations as indications of Beyond the Standard Model physics (BSM). The focus is to study the prospects for discovering BSM physics in the dilepton final states with an assumed integrated luminosity ranging from 100 pb-1 to 1 fb-1.