Abstract:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, has produced first proton-proton collisions in late 2009, and the CMS experiment has already shown an impressive performance and level of understanding of these first data. The reason lies in the enormous commissioning campaign of CMS over the past years. I will present selected highlights from the first collision data and put them in perspective with both, the preparatory work of the past years based on the data-taking with cosmic-ray muons and first LHC beams in 2008, as well as the top-quark physics prospects expected from high-energy data taking in 2010.