LHCb physics, performance, prospects

The LHCb experiment at CERNs Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performs precision measurements of processes involving B-mesons and other hadrons containing b- or c-quarks. Of particular interest are observables that exhibit high sensitivity to possible contributions from New Physics. LHCb has seen a rapid and very successful startup during the first year of physics at the LHC. About 37 pb**-1 of pp-collisions at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV were collected in 2010, first competitive results from the analysis of these data were presented at the 2011 winter conferences. Analyses based on an almost ten times larger data set collected in spring 2011 are being prepared for the summer conferences. About 1 fb**-1 are going to be collected by the end of 2011. These data will enable LHCb to perform sensitive searches for New Physics in many analyses