Wednesday 14 January 2015 Speaker: Dr Pablo Rodriguez Perez (University of Manchester) Title: "The LHCb VELO upgrade project" Abstract: The LHCb VELO is the silicon strip detector that is placed inside a secondary vacuum around the interaction region of LHCb. The upgrade of the LHCb experiment, planned for 2018, will enable the detector to run at a luminosity of 2x1033/cm2/s and explore New Physics effects in the beauty and charm sector with unprecedented precision. To achieve this, the entire readout will be transformed into a hardware triggerless system operating at 40 MHz, where the event selection algorithms will be executed by high-level software in the CPU farm. The upgraded VELO must be lightweight, radiation hard, vacuum compatible, and has to drive data to the data acquisition system at speeds of up to 3 Tbit/s. This challenge will be met with a new VELO design based on 55x55 micron element hybrid pixel detectors, positioned to within 5 mm of the LHC colliding beams. The material budget is optimised with the use of evaporative CO2 coolant circulating in microchannels within a thin silicon substrate. The VELO group is also focussing effort on the construction of a lightweight foil to separate the primary and secondary LHC vacua, the development of high-speed data acquisition boards, and the radiation qualification of the pixel detector modules. The talk will review the main challenges of the VELO upgrade as well as the status of the ongoing work.