Earlier today I reported about the publication of a paper by a non-professional physicist, Carl Brannen. Now I have to do the same for a paper -the first one in a long and groundbreaking series, you can bet- from the CMS collaboration, one of the two main experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.

Of course, the CMS Collaboration (which is over 2500-strong) has published countless articles already in the course of the last ten years or so: technical design reports of the various detector subsystems, computing model, data acquisition architecture; Monte Carlo studies of the discovery reach for this or that exotic particle, or for the measurement of the Standard Model parameters; and most recently, 23 quite interesting papers using real data collected in 2008 and 2009 -almost a billion cosmic rays punching through the detector.

But today, CMS got accepted for publication (by JINST) the first physics paper reporting on a measurement performed with real proton-proton collision data, at 900 GeV and at the highest-energy ever achieved so far in man-made particle collisions, 2.36 TeV. It is a paper on the density of charged particles produced in the collisions, and the measurement is not groundbreaking: rather, it is little more than a check of low-energy quantum chromodynamics at the new energy of proton collisions. Nevertheless, it is a first important step, and I feel the need to congratulate with those colleagues of mine who have focused all their energies in that analysis and in the subsequent collaboration review, during  the last couple of months.

In the meantime, I am concentrating on three different papers which will soon enter the pipeline of the publication process. None of them is discovery physics, of course -the small bounty of data collected in 2009 does not even come close to providing the base for such endeavours- but they will be thrilling to produce!