(...) The studies presented in this thesis were performed using data collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The LHC is the largest and highest energy particle accelerator ever built. Around 10000 physicists and engineers around the world are taking part in this experience by developing new techniques and approaches to identify the interesting physics buried in the complex environment produced in the LHC pp collisions. The LHC produced its first pp collisions on November 23, 2009 at the injection energy of 450 GeV. On March 19, 2010 the LHC broke a record by raising the beam energy to 3.5 TeV, and the first pp collisions at 7 TeV were recorded on March 30, 2010. The beam energy for the whole 2011 year was 3.5 TeV per beam, while in 2012 the beam energy is 4 TeV. At the beginning of 2013 the LHC will go into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy collisions starting in 2014. At the four collision points of the LHC, detectors have been placed to study the high-energy collisions. One of these detectors, ATLAS, a general purpose detector with an extensive initial physics program. The ATLAS detector consists of a tracking system in a 2 T solenoid field, providing coverage up to a pseudo-rapidity of |η|<2.5, sampling electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters up to |η|<4.9, muon chambers in a toroidal magnetic field and a trigger system consisting of three levels of event selection. So far, the ATLAS sub-detectors have shown an excellent performance in terms of efficiency and resolution. This thesis contains three different analyses interconnected. The main one concerns the results of the search for new resonances that decay to top-quark pairs using the first 2.05 fb-1 of data collected by the ATLAS detector in 2011. Secondly and related to this search, performance studies of the Jet Vertex Fraction (JVF) in top-quark pairs topologies are presented too. JVF is a variable that can be used to reduce the pile-up effects to improve the precision and sensitivity of physics analyses at high luminosities. Finally, results regarding the performance, validation in data and associated systematic uncertainty derivation of the Global Sequential (GS) jet calibration are discussed. The determination of the jet energy scale and the achievement of the optimal jet performance is of key importance to many LHC physics analyses, specially to the main analysis of this thesis due to the presence of jets in the final state. The results are presented in order that they were performed during the thesis.
