  Many extensions of the Standard Model posit the existence of heavy particles
with long lifetimes. This article presents the results of a search for events
containing at least one long-lived particle that decays at a significant
distance from its production point into two leptons or into five or more
charged particles. This analysis uses a data sample of proton-proton collisions
at $\sqrt{s}$ = 8 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3
fb$^{-1}$ collected in 2012 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron
Collider. No events are observed in any of the signal regions, and limits are
set on model parameters within supersymmetric scenarios involving R-parity
violation, split supersymmetry, and gauge mediation. In some of the search
channels, the trigger and search strategy are based only on the decay products
of individual long-lived particles, irrespective of the rest of the event. In
these cases, the provided limits can easily be reinterpreted in different
scenarios.
