LHCb status and early physics prospects

— LHCb is a dedicated detector for b and c physics at the LHC. I will present a concise review of the detector design and expected performance together with some first results on the commissioning of the different sub-systems based on cosmic data and particle beams delivered by the LHC during the summer of 2008. The experiment is ready to exploit first data expected from the LHC. An integrated luminosity of ∼ 0.3 fb, which should be collected during the first year of physics running, will already allow LHCb to perform a number of very significant mesurements with the potential of revealing New Physics effects, such as the measurement of the Bs mixing phase φJ/ψφ, or the search for the decay B 0 s → μ μ beyond the limit set by CDF and D0.