The ATLAS tau trigger

The tau lepton plays a crucial role in understanding particle physics at the Tera scale. One of the most promising probes of the Higgs boson coupling to fermions is with detector signatures involving taus. In addition, many theories beyond the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry and exotic particles (W' and Z'), predict new physics with large couplings to taus. The ability to trigger on hadronic tau decays is therefore critical to achieving the physics goals of the ATLAS experiment. The higher instantaneous luminosities of proton-proton collisions achieved by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 resulted in a larger probability of overlap (pile-up) between bunch crossings, and so it was critical for ATLAS to have an effective tau trigger strategy. The details of this strategy are summarized in this paper, and the results of the latest performance measurements are presented.