The ATLAS Tau Trigger

Physics processes involving tau leptons play a crucial role in understanding particle physics at the high energy frontier. The ability to efficiently trigger on events containing hadronic tau decays is therefore of particular importance to the ATLAS experiment. During the 2012 run, the Large Hadronic Collder (LHC) reached instantaneous luminosities of nearly $10^{34} cm^{-2}s^{-1}$ with bunch crossings occurring every $50 ns$. This resulted in a huge event rate and a high probability of overlapping interactions per bunch crossing (pile-up). With this in mind it was necessary to design an ATLAS tau trigger system that could reduce the event rate to a manageable level, while efficiently extracting the most interesting physics events in a pile-up robust manner. In this poster the ATLAS tau trigger is described, its performance during 2012 is presented, and the outlook for the LHC Run II is briefly summarized.