CMS status and first data

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (Lhc) has started to collect and analyze proton-proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV from the first physics run of the Lhc. At the time of this meeting, CMS had collected a 17nb-1 of collision data, including small samples at lower energies of 0.9 TeV and 2.36 TeV. While these samples are too small for observation of top quark pair production, the results presented here demonstrate good detector performance and illustrate well-understood physics signatures that will lead in the near future to re-observation of the top quark at the Lhc. Those signatures include jets, isolated muons and electrons from weak gauge boson decay, and separated secondary vertices from b-quark jets. With the capability to identify these signatures in collision data, CMS is poised for top physics studies from the first Lhc physics run.