Early top-pair cross-section measurements at ATLAS

Top-quark pairs are expected to be produced copiously at the LHC, even at the lower beam energies and luminosities expected in the first year of running. Establishing the top-pair signal and measuring the production cross-section will be important benchmarks for ATLAS, which will also help understand the detector performance for events with high pT leptons, high jet multiplicity, missing transverse energy and b-jets. The prospects for early measurements with top-quark pairs at a centre of mass energy of 10 TeV will be shown, with a particular emphasis on the understanding of backgrounds through data-driven methods.