Search for charged long-lived heavy particles with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC

We report on the search for charged long-lived heavy particles, predicted by several theories beyond the Standard Model. Such particles are potentially detectable at the LHC, given either their anomalous dE/dx loss measurable in the ATLAS Inner Detector, or their slow motion (beta < 1) which can be detected by the Calorimeter, or even their muon-likeness identified by the Muon Spectrometer. In particular, the Inner-Detector-based search, measuring the track parameters in the vicinity of the interaction point, is sensitive to possible metastable particles, or to changes in the charge due to interactions with the detector material, which may make the particles invisible to farther subdetectors. Results of this search with the Inner-Detector-based approach on part of the data sample collected by ATLAS during 2011 are shown.