Search strategies for charged Higgs bosons in ATLAS

Charged Higgs bosons are predicted by various theories beyond the Standard Model, where the Higgs sector consists of more than only one doublet of scalar fields. Search strategies for charged Higgs bosons in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are presented. In particular, if m_{H+} <m_{top}, the top quark can decay to a bottom quark and a light charged Higgs boson, for which some of the dominant decays are H^+ to csbar and H^+ to tau+nu$ (depending on the parameter space). After a reminder of the ATLAS search strategies for heavy charged Higgs bosons, for a 14 TeV LHC operation, results of Monte-Carlo studies recently performed for a 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy, i.e. for the early data-taking period, are presented.