| The Hardware Surface Veto board is part of the
Radio
Ice Cerenkov Experiment (RICE) which uses the polar ice cap as a detector for
cosmic neutrinos. The following is a simple description, followed
by more technical details of the HSV
board. The cartoon below gives a crude idea of the
experimental setup. Neutrinos occasionally interact with the ice
and give off radiation (a rare event). The radiation (green lines)
is detected by antennas (red dots). The antenna signals are fed to
a data acquisition system in a building on the surface where they are
digitized. The problem is that similar radiation is generated from the
surface (blue lines) at vastly higher rates. Every time one of
these events occurs, it ties up the data acquisition for "a long time"
(milliseconds) so that possible neutrino events would be lost. The HSV
board can detect and screen out many of these spurious events before
they reach the data acquisition system (about a microsecond), making the
system vastly more efficient.
Continue . . .
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