Prospects for the discovery of 4th family quarks with the ATLAS detector

The pair production of heavy fourth-generation quarks, which are predicted under the hypothesis of flavor democracy, is studied using tree-level Monte Carlo generators and fast detector simulation. Two heavy-quark mass values, 500 and 750 GeV, are considered with the assumption that the fourth family mixes primarily with the two light families. It is shown that a clear signature will be observed in the data collected by the ATLAS detector, after the first year of low-luminosity running at the Large Hadron Collider.