An absolute luminosity monitor for the LHCb experiment

A novel method of measuring the absolute luminosity at colliding beam experiments is proposed. The method is based on a measurement of beam–gas interaction vertices to determine beam shapes and overlaps. This method can be applied at the LHCb experiment without the need for any modifications of existing sub-detectors and it is entirely based on the LHCb Vertex Locator (VELO) silicon tracker.