Charm and beauty physics at ATLAS

ATLAS has a rich charmonium and beauty physics programme. After a few pb$^{-1}$ of 7~TeV collision data have been taken at the LHC, ATLAS will be able to start probing the new energy regime with decays of the $psi$ and $Upsilon$ families of mesons into pairs of muons. The very first measurements, possible with only a few pb$^{-1}$ of data, will include the fraction of $J/psi$ mesons produced in $B$-hadron decays, the average lifetime of $B$-hadrons decaying via $J/psi$, and the differential $J/psi$ production cross section. Crucial to all of these measurements are the performance of the muon triggers and the offline muon reconstruction and identification, as well as the inner detector performance and tracking. The performance of these elements with respect to the LHC data taken thus far as well as the prospects for the early charm and beauty physics at ATLAS are presented.