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Super Computing 2000 Photo Gallery Page 4
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Both Brookhaven Lab, Fermi Lab and SLAC had stuff on the floor at
SC2000. Fermi Lab and SLAC shared a booth and had some nice High
Energy detector technology on display. Being a High Energy Nuclear
physicists, I couldn't help but take some photos of this stuff.
A photo of a rare species, a female physicist. I bet you that they
are even more rare than in the software world. I can't remember her
name, but she is an Argentinian graduate student working on DO, an
experiment at the Tevatron in Fermi Lab. Her job is to debug a bunch
of readout cards for the new fiber tracker DO is building which should
go online this spring for FNAL's run II.
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The fiber tracker mockup is actually below the small table. I tried to
zoom in and get a picture of the scintillating fibers. As you can see,
they seem go glow. It's hard to get a picture of them without the
proper camera and lighting setup. You can sort of see the row of green
dots at the end of the fibers. That's the light which will be
collected by the readout electronics the Argentinian graduate student
is working on.
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This is a zoom in of the mechanical structure which couples the light
guide to the readout electronics. If I used a flash, you wouldn't be able
to see the green light generated by the scintillating fibers. Thus the
blurred image.
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This is the readout electronics for the Silicon Vertex detector for
DO. Each one of those squares is a very dense array of amplifiers, one
per channel. Typically these silicon vertex detectors have hundreds of
thousands of channels to be read out and this kind of dense amplifier
circuits are needed to read them out.
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My favorite, a simple cosmic ray counter. The PC cards which sit around
the detector look as if they were built back in the early 80's. This
is probably true. 6 plastic scintillator counters are arranged in a
circle. The signals from 2 counters, each opposite of each other, are
fed into a coincidence circuit such that the counter on the PC cards
will increment when the two fire at the same time. This happens when a
cosmic ray traverses the two. The 3 arrows on the display point to the
3 pairs of detectors in coincidence. The neat thing about this display
is that it shows you that if cosmic rays are going through it, then
they are certainly going through you as well. There is not much you
can do about hiding from them either, unless you want to become a
hermit and live in a deep mine under the Rockies.
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