Performance, radiation damage effects and upgrade of the LHCB vertex locator

LHCb is a dedicated experiment to study new physics in the decays of heavy hadrons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Heavy hadrons are identified through their flight distance in the Vertex Locator (VELO), the retractable silicon-strip vertex detector surrounding the LHCb interaction point at only 8 mm from the beam during normal LHC operation. The VELO consists of a series of silicon micro-strip detectors and operates in an extreme and highly non-uniform radiation environment. The performance of the LHCb VELO during the first three years of LHC physics running and the primary results from radiation damage studies are presented. Plans for an upgraded detector by 2018 with a 40 MHz readout are also presented.