The LHCb VELO upgrade

LHCb is a forward spectrometer experiment dedicated to the study of new physics in the decays of beauty and charm hadrons produced in proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The VErtex LOcator (VELO) is the microstrip silicon detector surrounding the interaction point, providing tracking and vertexing measurements. The upgrade of the LHCb experiment, planned for 2018, will increase the luminosity up to 2×1033 cm−2 s−1 and will perform the readout as a trigger-less system with an event rate of 40 MHz. Extremely non-uniform radiation doses will reach up to 5×1015 1 MeV neq/cm2 in the innermost regions of the VELO sensors, and the output data bandwidth will be increased by a factor of 40. An upgraded detector is under development based in a pixel sensor of the Timepix/Medipix family, with 55×55μm2 pixels. In addition a microstrip solution with finer pitch, higher granularity and thinner than the current detector is being developed in parallel. The current status of the VELO upgrade program will be described together with recent testbeam results