Developing radiation hard silicon for the LHCb vertex locator

LHCb is a dedicated experiment at the LHC to study CP violation. The vertex locator is a silicon detector designed to provide precise information on the production and decay vertices of b-hadrons both off-line and for the second level trigger. The active silicon is positioned only 8 mm from the LHC beam and will operate in an extreme radiation environment (up to 1.3 × 10 14 1 MeV neutron equivalents / cm 2 /year). A report is presented on the sensor design and the related radiation hard silicon research, including promising new results on Czochralski silicon.