PT Journal AU ATLAS Collaboration (Aad, Gea Alvarez Piqueras, D Cabrera Urban, S Castillo Gimenez, V Costa, MJ Fernandez Martinez, P Ferrer, A Fiorini, L Fuster, J Garcia, C Garcia Navarro, JE Gonzalez de la Hoz, S Hernandez Jimenez, Y Higon-Rodriguez, E Irles Quiles, A Jimenez Pena, J Kaci, M King, M Lacasta, C Lacuesta, VR Marti-Garcia, S Mitsou, VA Oliver Garcia, E Pedraza Lopez, S Perez Garcia-Estañ, MT Romero Adam, E Ros, E Salt, J Sanchez Martinez, V Soldevila, U Sanchez, J Valero, A Valladolid Gallego, E Valls Ferrer, JA Vos, M TI Search for flavour-changing neutral current top-quark decays to q Z in pp collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at root s=8 TeV SO European Physical Journal C JI Eur. Phys. J. C PY 2016 BP 12 EP 24pp VL 76 IS 1 DI 10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3851-5 LA English AB A search for the flavour-changing neutral-current decay is presented. Data collected by the ATLAS detector during 2012 from proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at a centre-of-mass energy of root s = 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb(-1), are analysed. Top-quark pair-production events with one top quark decaying through the t -> qZ (q = u,c) channel and the other through the dominant Standard Model mode t -> bW are considered as signal. Only the decays of the Z boson to charged leptons and leptonic W boson decays are used. No evidence for a signal is found and an observed (expected) upper limit on the t -> qZ branching ratio of 7 x 10(-4) (8 x 10(-4)) is set at the 95 % confidence level. ER