Radiation damage in 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 beauty and charm hadrons are identified through their flight distance in the Vertex Locator (VELO), and hence the detector is critical for both the trigger and offline physics analyses. Due to their close proximity to the LHC beam the VELO sensors are exposed to higher fluences than those of any other LHC subdetector. These proceedings present the primary results from radiation damage studies performed from the start of LHC data taking until late 2012. They include the first observation of type-inversion at the LHC, the highest statistics measurement of the silicon effective band gap after irradiation, and the observation of a radiation- induced charge loss effect due to the presence of a second metal layer.