The CMS Experiment: Status and Highlights

We present the status of the CMS experiment at the LHC and the highlights of its first physics results. Using pp collisions at centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, about 303nb-1 of integrated luminosity have been collected by CMS out of a total of about 346nb-1 delivered by LHC. We report on the performance of the trigger and the data acquisition systems, on the commissioning of the main detector components and on the physics objects and tools. The first physics measurements performed on these data are then described. We present results on charged hadrons multiplicities, inclusive jet cross section and measurements of the J/Psi and Y differential cross section as a function of pT. We then show results on W and Z bosons, including measurements of their production cross sections. Lastly we present the first observation of top quark pairs produced at the LHC and identified both in single-lepton and di-lepton decay channels.