Reconstruction of hadronic tau candidates in QCD events at ATLAS with 7 TeV proton-proton collisions

The first LHC collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s)=7 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector are used to study the reconstruction and identification algorithms for hadronic $\tau$ decays. Although almost no real $\tau$ leptons are expected in this dataset, identification variables on background jets reconstructed as $\tau$ candidates are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo simulations. Good agreement is observed between data and the fake $\tau$ candidates selected from simulated QCD dijet events, giving confidence in the performance of the algorithms on real $\tau$ leptons, to be observed soon.