The ATLAS Tau Trigger

The ATLAS experiment at CERN’s LHC has implemented a dedicated tau trigger system to select hadronically decaying tau leptons from the enormous background of QCD jets. This promises a significant increase in the discovery potential to the Higgs boson and in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. The three level trigger system has been optimised for effciency and good background rejection. The first level uses information from the calorimeters only, while the two higher levels include also information from the tracking detectors. Shower shape variables and the track multiplicity are important variables to distinguish taus from QCD jets. At the initial lumonosity of 10^31 cm^−2 s^−1, single tau triggers with a transverse energy threshold of 50 GeV or higher can be run standalone. Below this level, the tau signatures will be combined with other event signature