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Super Computing 2000 Photo Gallery Page 4





The following content is Copyright 2000 by Stephen Adler. Please
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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.
fibertracker1Crop.jpg


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.
fibertracker2Crop.jpg


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.
fibertracker3Crop.jpg


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.
readoutelecCrop.jpg


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.
cosmicCrop.jpg




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