Description
The Vertex Locator (VELO), surrounding the interaction region of the LHCb experiment, reconstructs the collision points (primary vertices) and decay vertices of long-lived particles (secondary vertices). The upgraded VELO will be composed of 52 modules placed along the beam axis divided into two retractable halves. The modules will each be equipped with 4 silicon hybrid pixel tiles, each read out with by 3 VeloPix ASICs, glued onto a thin silicon plate with embedded micro-channels that allow the circulation of liquid CO$_2$. The silicon sensors must withstand an integrated fluence of up to 8$\times 10^{15}$ 1 MeV n$_{eq}$/cm$^{2}$, a roughly equivalent dose of 400 MRad. The highest occupancy ASICs will have pixel hit rates of 900 Mhit/s and produce an output data rate of over 15 Gbit/s.
The design of the VELO upgrade will be presented with the results from the latest R\&D and detector construction.
