Search for supersymmetry in final states with three leptons and missing transverse energy with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider

The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider has collected an unprecedented amount of data in the 3 years of data taking since its start. In this document I will discuss the results of the analysis I performed during my PhD at the university of Sussex for the search of Supersymmetry in events with three leptons (electron/muon/tau) and missing transverse energy in the final state. The search is performed on the full dataset collected by the experiment in 2012, at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. These results are interpreted in SUSY models with chargino-neutralino pair production via decays involving sleptons, staus, gauge bosons and the newly discovered Higgs boson. These results presented improve on previous searches performed at ATLAS in three lepton final states with only electrons and muons. Special focus will be given to the optimisation process of Supersymmetry signal with respect to the SM background, and the statistical interpretation of the results obtained with this search.