Speaker
Description
Muon tomography is an emerging technology being used as a Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) technique in the context of the industry, civil engineering, border security, volcanology and others. This technology exploits cosmic muons as a natural radiation source and the fact that they attenuate and suffer scattering when crossing matter, in a way that correlates with the geometry and density of the materials. The amount of attenuation and scattering can be used to produce tomographic images of the objects under inspection. These two effects, however, correlate also strongly with the momentum of the muons, which is a magnitude hard to measure with cost-effective detectors. This talk presents a proof-of-concept project to measure muon momentum using Time-Of-Flight measurements of the muons based on the time measurement provided by the Low-Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs). A muon tomography telescope with a time resolution of ~ 50 ps is under construction, using the LGAD sensors, fast readout electronics and a precise distributed clock system. In addition, dedicated Machine-Learning algorithms are being developed using the momentum information in order to improve the final resolution of the technique. This work is a joint effort of the CNM, ITAINNOVA, and IFCA.
