Absolute luminosity measurements at LHCb

Absolute luminosity measurements are of general interest for colliding-beam experiments at storage rings. These measurements are necessary to determine the absolute cross-sections of reaction processes and are valuable to quantify the performance of the accelerator. LHCb has applied two methods to determine the absolute scale of its luminosity measurements for proton-proton collisions at the LHC running at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. In addition to the classic ``van der Meer'' scan method a novel technique has been developed which makes use of direct imaging of the individual beams using both proton-gas and proton-proton interactions. The beam imaging method is made possible by the high resolution of the LHCb vertex detector and the close proximity of the detector to the beams, and allows beam parameters such as positions, angles and widths to be determined. We describe both methods and compare the two results. In addition, we present the techniques used to transport the absolute luminosity measurement to the full data-taking period.