Multi-lepton SUSY searches with the ATLAS detector

We investigate the potential of the ATLAS detector to discover new physics events containing three leptons ($e$ or $mu$). In the context of supersymmetric models, they could result from the direct production of gaugino pairs or from gauginos in decay chains accompanied by jets. In scenarios with heavy sfermions, direct gaugino production could be a discovery channel. Such searches are complementary to more standard strategies which rely more on jets.