Physics Analysis Tools for the CMS Experiment at LHC

The CMS experiment is expected to start data taking during 2008, and large data samples, of the peta-bytes scale, will be produced each year. The CMS Physics Tools package provides the CMS physicist with a powerful and flexible software layer for analysis of these huge datasets that is well integrated in the CMS experiment software. C++ generic programming is used to allow simple extensions of analysis tools. A core part of this package is the Candidate Model providing a coherent interface to different types of data. Standard tasks such as combinatorial analyses, generic cuts, MC truth matching and constrained fitting are supported. Advanced template techniques enable the user to add missing features easily. We explain the underlying model, certain details of the implementation and present some use cases showing how the tools are currently used in generator and full simulation studies as preparation for analysis of real data.