Developing Radiation Hard Silicon for the LHCb Vertex Locator

The 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 8 mm from the LHC beam and will operate in an extreme radiation environment (up to 1.3 x 10$^14$ 1 MeV neutron equivalents /cm$^2$ / year). A report is presented on the sensor design and the related radiation hard silicon research, including promising new results on Czochralski silicon.