First Results from the LHCb Vertex Locator

LHCb is a dedicated experiment to study new physics in the decays of beauty and charm hadrons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The Vertex Locator (VELO) is the silicon detector surrounding the interaction point, and compared to the vertex detectors of the other LHC experiments, it is the closest LHC vertex detector to the beam interaction point, being located only 7 mm from the beam during normal operation. The detector operates in an extreme and highly non-uniform radiation environment. The VELO consists of two retractable detector halves with 21 silicon micro-strip tracking modules each. The VELO has been commissioned and successfully operated during the initial running period of the LHC. The preliminary operational results and detector performances are reported.