  Periodic nuclear transients have been detected with increasing frequency,
with one such system -- ASASSN-14ko -- exhibiting highly regular outbursts on a
timescale of $114 \pm 1$ days. It has been postulated that the outbursts from
this source are generated by the repeated partial disruption of a star, but how
the star was placed onto such a tightly bound orbit about the supermassive
black hole remains unclear. Here we use analytic arguments and three-body
integrations to demonstrate that the Hills mechanism, where a binary system is
destroyed by the tides of the black hole, can lead to the capture of a star on
a $\sim 114$ day orbit and with a pericenter distance that is comparable to the
tidal radius of one of the stars within the binary. Thus, Hills capture can
produce stars on tightly bound orbits that undergo repeated partial disruption,
leading to a viable mechanism for generating not only the outbursts detected
from ASASSN-14ko, but for periodic nuclear transients in general. We also show
that the rate of change of the period of the captured star due to
gravitational-wave emission is likely too small to produce the observed value
for ASASSN-14ko, indicating that in this system there must be additional
effects that contribute to the decay of the orbit. In general, however,
gravitational-wave emission can be important for limiting the lifetimes of
these systems, and could produce observable period decay rates in future
events.
