Top quark physics at CMS

The top quark has a special interest in the standard model of elementary particles: its high mass and its Yukawa coupling close to unity suggest it can play a special role in the electroweak symmetry breaking and be sensitive to new physics phenomena. For these reasons, studies of top quark physics are a fundamental component of the search program of the CMS collaboration. In this talk, we present the status of the search of the top quark at CMS in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. In particular, we present studies for the selection of a signal of top quark pair production in the lepton+jets and in the dilepton decay channels. Yields of events from background processes are estimated and compared with early LHC data, indicating the potential for a measurement of the top pair production cross section.