A new method for imaging nuclear threats using cosmic ray muons

Abstract

Muon tomography is a technique that uses cosmic ray muons to generate three dimensional images of volumes using information contained in the Coulomb scattering of the muons. Advantages of this technique are the ability of cosmic rays to penetrate significant overburden and the absence of any additional dose delivered to subjects under study above the natural cosmic ray flux. Disadvantages include the relatively long exposure times and poor position resolution and complex algorithms needed for reconstruction. Here we demonstrate a new method for obtaining improved position resolution and statistical precision for objects with spherical symmetry

Application of muon tomography to fuel cask monitoring

“…The resulting angular distributions were fitted with a modified multi-group model. The multi-group model described in references [19,23,24] uses a multi-group model of the cosmic ray muon energy spectrum to fit the measured angular distribution. Unlike other methods, this provides a good description of the tails in the angular distribution and provides more precise thickness precision [25].…”

Imaging the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore using cosmic rays

“…An image of the vertical plane passing through the iron bars was reconstructed as explained in [23] and the resulting image is shown in figure 3a.…”

“…The difference in atomic number between materials results in a difference in their radiation length. By measuring the distribution of cosmic muon scattering angles after they traverse an object of interest, an image of the object itself can be reconstructed as described in [23]. By using MSMR on the inner wall of the Florence dome, we will be able to identify and image iron elements inside the masonry of the dome.…”

Slit identification for a uranium slab using a binary classifier based on cosmic-ray muon scattering

“…where θ is the scattering angle, N is the number of muons, f (•) is the probabilistic density function, and σ is dependent on the radiation length of the material traversed [12]:…”