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 8mm from the LHC beam and will operate in an extreme radiation environment (up to 1.3x10141MeV neutron equivalents/cm2/year). A report is presented on the sensor design and the related radiation hard silicon research, including promising new results on Czochralski silicon