High School students at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center assembled some 500 of these Optical Decoder Units for Hadron Calorimeter of the CMS detector. High school teachers helped design the units, which are currently installed at ready for LHC startup at CERN. The ODUs are simple adding machines for light; output from each tower–a sequence of absorbing and detecting materials–are added together, transformed from photons to electrons, amplified, and then back to photons to make the trip to trigger computers, where decisions will be made–every 25 nanoseconds–whether to store the signal.
I uploaded this picture using flickr uploadr, and edited it using flickr’s online editing tool, picnik. These are good tools to have in place for blogging: images already stored on your computer are more efficiently uploaded to flickr (in bulk) and then sent directly from flickr to your blog.