The Physics Analysis Tools project for the ATLAS experiment

The Large Hadron Collider is expected to start colliding proton beams in 2009. The enormous amount of data produced by the ATLAS experiment (≈1 PB per year) will be used in searches for the Higgs boson and Physics beyond the standard model. In order to meet this challenge, a suite of common Physics Analysis Tools (PAT) has been developed as part of the Physics Analysis software project. These tools run within the ATLAS software framework, ATHENA, covering a wide range of applications. There are tools responsible for event selection based on analysed data and detector quality information, tools responsible for specific physics analysis operations including data quality monitoring and physics validation, and complete analysis toolkits (frameworks) with the goal to aid the physicist to perform his analysis hiding the details of the ATHENA framework.