The LHCb upgrade

The LHCb experiment is designed to perform high-precision measurements of CP violation and search for New Physics using the enormous flux of beauty and charmed hadrons produced at the LHC. The LHCb detector is a single-arm spectrometer with excellent tracking and particle identification capabilities. The operation and the results obtained from the data collected in 2010 and 2011 demonstrate that the detector is robust and functioning very well. In the next years, LHCb will measure a large number of interesting channels in heavy flavor decays. However, the limit of 1 fb-1 of data per year cannot be overcome without improving the detector. An upgraded spectrometer with a 40MHz readout and a much more flexible software-based triggering system will increase the data rate as well as the efficiency specially in the hadronic channels, widening our physics scope beyond that of heavy flavor. Here, the different possibilities under study for the different detectors are reviewed as well as the ongoing R&D activities. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of the organizing committee for TIPP 11.