Development of Scintillator‐Based Muon Detectors for Muography

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe basic features and give some current applications of the most popular detection technology used in muography: the scintillator-based muon detectors, widely used not only in volcanology, where their properties find natural applications, but also in geosciences, archeology, non-invasive industrial control, civil engineering, homeland security, nuclear non-proliferation and more. As we will emphasize in the following sections, there are many advantages in the use of scintillators, which are known to be robust -and therefore usable in harsh environmental conditions -and offer real-time analogic measurement capabilities with a good space and time resolution. The design of such detectors is flexible and may be used in many different ways depending on the target under study, the field conditions, the modularity of the detectors etc. Throughout this chapter, we will focus on one particular muon detector (also referred to as "muon telescope") originally designed to study the active volcanic dome of the Soufrière of Guadeloupe to show the generic features of this detection technique.

Trends in Publishing Muography Related Research: The Situation at the End of 2020

“…JAIS-292, 2022 While the bulk of the earlier literature focused on applications, more and more papers from 2010 onwards have had a more technical approach. Publications of this kind concentrate on detector designs [43,44,45,46,47], software codes and simulation toolkits [48,49,50,51], algorithms [52,53,54], and comparison studies [55,56,57]. It can be anticipated that this type of research continues for many years to come as continuous development of tools and methodologies is an essential part of the development of muography.…”

Muography

“…Although it is impossible to introduce all of these applications here, several successful examples will be briefly explained in this section. (C) Online 3D density reconstruction in front of a tunnel-boring machine (TBM) is shown as an application example of tomography 118 . Each cube is 1m 3 volume.…”

“…Detecting such anomalies prior to physically encountering them requires real-time density analysis which muography can provide via continuous 3D reconstruction of the geology in front of a tunnel-boring machine (TBM). Since 2017, the Lyon team, France and its startup MUODIM (www.muodim.com) developed the concept and the original reconstruction algorithms for application to the drilling of the "Grand Paris Express" subway network, using scintillator-based muon detectors 118 . Because the muon detector is designed to image structures while moving forward, the muon flux crossing a particular geological object measured by the telescope has different directions to analyze with respect to time, which can be combined to generate 3D density estimates (Figure 7C).…”

Muography, Outreaching, and Transdisciplinarity: Toward theGolden Age of Muography

“…The muon detector geometries, shapes, and sizes are by necessity varied to carry out muography in absorption and scattering modes and in different physical environments (e.g., surface, underground, borehole, underwater, and airborne). There are also a multitude of variations in muon detection itself as this can be done, for example, with plastic scintillators [3], nuclear emulsions [4], drift chambers [5], micro-mesh gaseous structures [6], resistive plate chambers [7], and multiwire proportional chambers [8].…”