Nuclear emulsions with high positional resolution have long been used in particle physics experiments. In the field of muography, it has recently become known around the world as one of the techniques for imaging the inner structure of nuclear reactors and pyramids. We considered using nuclear emulsions which are compact, power-less, waterproof to observe the density distribution inside a...
We have developed a portable muography detector for internal infrastructure condition exploration and feasibility study for underground cavity detection [1]. The detector comprises two muon position sensitive detectors (mu-PSDs), with a detection area of 132 \times 132 mm$^2$ each. In a test measurement of a seven-story building from underground, we found this simple system could identify...
The LouMu collaboration was established between the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP), the Institute of Earth Sciences (ICT) and the Ciência Viva Center of Lousal, to create the conditions for the use of muography as a novel method for subsurface geophysical surveys in Portugal, starting by an end-to-end test at the Lousal Mine. The exploitation of the...
The LouMu collaboration started developing transmission muography in 2019 with a Resistive Plate Chambers detector built by LIP. In its first campaign, the detector acquired data at various positions of the Physics Department building of the University of Coimbra. There, the detector acquired data at various locations at the Physics Department building. At each of these, the detector’s...
We applied muography for inspecting rock-filled debris dams that are consolidating river basins and allowing erosion control and flood protection of mountainous areas. The mass density image of a debris dam in the Karasugawa river, Gunma, Japan was produced with a spatial resolution of 0.5 m × 0.5 m. The comparison of density data reconstructed by muography and gamma-ray logging suggest the...
Using muon tomography to detect tunnels has been suggested and studied with promising results. This work revisits the idea in the context of border tunnels with applications to drug interdiction and military intrusions. Unlike previous studies, this work considers the detection of border tunnels as they are being built with the goal of detecting tunnels before they cross the border. Various...
A high resolution muography survey has been performed in the Királylaki tunnel in Budapest to search for unknown cavities. Preliminary radiographic measurements suggested large density anomalies above the tunnels in a 20--60 m thick cherty dolomite rock. Triangulation helped estimating the location and size of the anomalies, but for excavation, more precise information was needed.
A...
Transmission-based muography (TM) is becoming an innovative and non-destructive imaging technique based on the measurement of the cosmic ray muon flux attenuation within the matter, allowing the reconstruction of 2D-3D transmission and density polar maps. The presented abstract introduces our latest results about the TM technique measurements we have carried out with the aim of ore bodies...
The TRUST-ME project is a new application of MUon Survey Tomography based on Micromegas detector for Unreachable Sites Technology (MUST²) to address a societal challenge of increasing importance: sustainable water management. To this end, a network of application-oriented muon trackers is being developed to both survey groundwater in aquifers and enhance the safety and operational efficiency...
As cosmic muons traverse a target they interact with it (eg. bremsstrahlung,..) that induces a secondary radiation, whose spectra depends on the material-composition of the target. This imaging technique is sensitive to low-Z materials as well, opening a novel non-invasive material-identification method for medium-sized obscure targets.
Our Hungarian-Serbian collaboration pioneered in...
Muography is a rapidly expanding research field, its development boosted both by an emerging coherent research community as well as technology transfer towards professional end-users. Unlike the variety of applications, the measurement tool serves one purpose: efficient, reliable, sufficiently precise cosmic muon detection. The talk aims to give an overview of the instrumental challenges,...
Unconsolidated materials and soils have a general capability to absorb and retain fluids because of their porosity. Measuring this water content can be important for certain applications such as heap leaching.
Heap leaching is mineral processing technology wherein certain metals (e.g. Cu, Au, Ag..) are extracted from a stack of crushed mineral ore via chemical reactions initiated by a...
The massive and growing global port trade demands efficient procedures and technologies to inspect in an automated way containers and vehicles where goods and materials are carried. The MUON CARGO project [1], co-financed by Puertos del Estado [2] (public business entity under the Spanish Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda), has been launched with the aim of complementing the...
Muon scattering tomography is a novel cosmic muon imaging technique that exploits the multiple Coulomb-scattering of the cosmic muons.
Imaging and identification of enclosed high-Z materials become possible,
usable in large volume scanners. The proof of concept is supported via several simulation frameworks and experimental demonstartions.
As the scattering angle strongly depends on...
The natural flux of cosmic-ray muons impinges upon the Earth’s surface allows us to study the interior composition, density and obtain 3D-reconstructions of geological and human-made structures using muon detectors.
In this contribution, we describe the state-of-the-art muon tracking system developed by the company GScan in collaboration with our research partners. The detector system...
The ScIDEP (Scintillator Imaging Detector for the Egyptian Pyramids) Collaboration is constructing a new scintillator-based muon telescope to investigate the internal structure of the Pyramid of Khafre at the Giza Plateau in Egypt. This pyramid is only slightly smaller than the Great Pyramid, however its known internal structure seems much simpler compared to the latter and hence raises the...
The Buda Castle is the largest underground muography project of Wigner Research Centre for Physics, and one of the major ones worldwide. The project has been running for more than four years, and we have about the same period until completion. The research area is the southern part of the hill of Buda Caste, Budapest, where the present castle and the partly buried ruins of the ancient ones are...
Archémuons is a collaborative project between the Institute of Physics of the 2 Infinities of Lyon (IP2I Lyon), the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon (LGL) and the Archéorient Laboratory. The three laboratories will perform surveys at the Palais de Mirroir of the Gallo Roman Museum of Vienne in France. The goal of the project is to evaluate how geology surveys (electric resistivity,...
The muon radiography technique provides non-invasive imaging of the interior of large structures (targets) by exploiting the absorption properties of atmospheric muons in the materials. The absorption of muons depends not only on the thickness of the material but also on its density. Using this technique it’s possible, thanks to the comparison with simulations that take into account the known...
Muography is being applied in a wide variety of areas, including applications in e.g. multidisciplinary research, industry, homeland security and society. A number of basic detector types have already been used for the construction of muon telescopes. Here, we investigate the usage and combination of advanced gaseous detector technologies to arrive at a high-performance muon telescope for...
Sakurajima Muography Observatory (SMO) is a modular infrastructure that is operating with 14 muon tracking systems based on gaseous detectors [1] and scintillators [2]. The SMO is monitoring the mass density changes through the volcanic edifice and in the atmosphere at the Sakurajima volcano, Japan. We discuss the recent observational results. We observed mass changes on the surface regions of...
Oceanic lithosphere cycling produces critical resources to economy and governs the occurrence various natural hazards from earthquakes to volcanic eruptions. Only a small portion of the shallow lithosphere is explored. The physical nature and geological meaning of the upper and lower crust boundaries and Mohorovičić discontinuity (Moho) between the oceanic crust and mantle are not yet fully...
The MUon RAdiography of VESuvius (MURAVES) project aims at the study of Mt. Vesuvius, an active and hazardous volcano near Naples, Italy, with the use of muons freely and abundantly produced by cosmic rays. In particular, the MURAVES experiment intends to perform muographic imaging of the internal structure of the summit of Mt. Vesuvius. The challenging measurement of the rock density...
The search for water on the lunar and martian surfaces is a crucial aspect of space exploration, aiding further understanding the history and evolution of these planetary bodies. However, our understanding of the distribution and concentration of these resources on the lunar and martian surfaces is limited. Moreover, we lack detailed data on the origin and migration of lunar and martian...
We have been developing muographic techniques with nuclear emulsions. Nuclear emulsions are lightweight, compact, and do not require a power supply. They are excellent for muography because they can be inserted into the interior of pyramids and other archaeological sites and boreholes, and can be used for large-area and multi-point observations for three-dimensional visualization.
Currently,...
We report muography of an archaeological site located in the highly populated “Sanità” district in the center of Naples, ten meters below the current street level. Several detectors capable of detecting muons were installed underground at the depth of 18 m, to measure the muon flux over several weeks. By measuring the differential flux with our detectors in a wide angular range, we have...
The MUon RAdiography of Mt. VESuvius (MURAVES) project aims to probe the internal structure of the summit of Mt. Vesuvius. The setup of the MURAVES detector consists of three identical and independent tracking hodoscopes, made of scintillator bars coupled to SiPM. The analyses often rely on simulation based predictions, in our case for a better comparison between the data and different density...
Cosmic rays interacting with the Earth's atmosphere generate cosmogenic neutrons, which subsequently interact with hydrogen in the atmosphere and soil to create epithermal neutrons with energies in the KeV range. The production of these particles is inversely proportional to soil hydrogen content. Cosmic Ray Neutron Sensors (CRNS) use this natural phenomenon to monitor soil moisture levels,...
EcoMug is a Monte Carlo generator of cosmic-ray muons, specifically designed for muon radiography and tomography applications. It is a header-only C++11 library, based on a parametrization of experimental data and, unlike other tools, gives the possibility of generating from different surfaces (plane, cylinder and half-sphere), while keeping the correct angular and momentum distribution of...
Muography solves density distributions of geological or anthropic structures by analyzing muon flux attenuation. Several composite simulation frameworks carry out muography feasibility studies for specific targets. Those methodologies use diverse codes such as CORSIKA, CRY, MUSIC, and GEANT4, increasing computing time and simulation complexity till precision orders higher than needed.
We...
Laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) were proposed 50 years ago as a compact alternative to radio-frequency technology. In an LPA, an intense laser pulse travels through a plasma and excites a plasma wave traveling behind it. LPAs can sustain acceleration gradients beyond 100 GV/m - thousands of times higher than conventional accelerator technology, allowing reducing the size of the machine by...
The TomOpt software has been developed to optimize the geometrical layout
and specifications of detectors designed for muon scattering tomography.
Based on differentiable programming techniques, TomOpt consists in a modular pipeline that models all the aspects of a muon tomography task, from the generation and interaction of cosmic ray muons with a parameterized detector and passive...
The MWPC-tracking based MOS (Muography Observation System), consisting of
tracking chambers and lead absorbers has been simulated in a very detailed
way in Geant4, with emphasis on all relevant physics phenomena and
including the effect of the read out electronics. The simulation results
were processed with the tracking algorithm dedicated and used for the
actual detector system.
It...
Many muon imaging algorithms require large amounts of simulated data to infer the densities and geometries of the objects under study. A typical muography simulation can be factorized in three different aspects: simulation of the initial muon flux, simulation of the propagation of the muons through matter, and simulation of the detector response. In this work we present how Generative...
Muography is a technique that uses cosmic-ray muons to probe the internal structure of objects. Muons are elementary particles that are naturally produced at high energy by the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth's atmosphere. Two imaging methods, respectively based on the absorption and scattering of muons, have been developed to exploit cosmic-ray muons in a wide range of applications...
Particle simulation software allows physicists to simulate the interactions of particles with matter at atomic and subatomic levels, providing means to study these interactions in a diverse range of scenarios and environments. Geant4 is one the most prominent toolkit for high-energy physics simulations, which can deal with particle transport through a wide range of materials for most standard...
Muography is increasingly applied in many applications, e.g. volcanology, archaeology, civil engineering, industry, mining, nuclear waste surveys, etc. For such applications, muon telescopes need to be installed in remote locations addressing extreme environmental conditions. To reduce the complexities during transportation and re-installation at the experimental site after the calibration and...
The MUTOMCA (MUon TOMography for shielding CAsks) project investigates the suitability of muon tomography for the re-verification of spent fuel casks.
Spent fuel casks are stored, for decades, in dedicated locations and are under constant surveillance by the international agencies Euratom and IAEA through unattended monitoring equipment. In the hypothetical case that these instruments would...
Cosmic ray tomography usually focusses on two key approaches: muon transmission and muon scattering tomography. Secondary particles produced from the interaction of air shower particles with the target material have not been fully exploited so far, although they have been proven to carry complementary information directly related to the target material properties. Previous work [1] showed a...
Since the beginning of their activities in 2015, the muography group of the Institute for Research on the Fundamental Laws of the Universe (IRFU-CEA-France) has been continuously evolving their muon telescopes (based on micromegas detectors) as well as their analysis methods. This allowed the performance of different experiments, going from civil engineering to archaeology, including the...
Throughout the past decade, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) has gained considerable expertise in the development of muon tomography techniques and algorithms for applications in nuclear waste management and safeguards verification. Two prototype muon detectors have been constructed at CNL’s Chalk River site: the Cosmic Ray Inspection and Passive Tomography (CRIPT) detector, a unique muon...
The SilentBorder project aims to develop and construct a new high-technology cosmic ray tomography (CRT) scanner for identification of hazardous and illegal goods hidden in trucks and sea containers. The scanner is based on natural cosmic ray tomography technology that is inherently safe for people and will enable scanning of shipping containers or cargo. We report on the development of the...
As of 2023, global nuclear weapon arsenals comprise approx. 13,000 warheads. Despite the renewed arms race among the nuclear weapon owners, it is the declared goal of many nations to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. While this is first a political task, technical research can support the goal by providing technical verification approaches for future international treaties. An ongoing...
Atmospheric ray tomography (ART) applies muons and electrons for imaging the 3D density and atomic composition of the scanned objects. In this talk, we will describe an industrial prototype system for ART-based technology developed by the company GScan. The prototype uses plastic scintillating fibre arrays achieving the spatial resolution 120 μm and 1 mrad angular resolution in the track...
