Muography applications developed by IFIN-HH

Abstract

Cosmic-ray muons have been studied at IFIN-HH for more than 20 years. Starting as fundamental physics research, the muon flux measurements bring new directions of study regarding muography. Two new directions have been recently developed: underground muon scanning of old mining sites in order to detect the possible presence of unknown cavities and underwater scanning of ships in commercial harbours in order to prevent the illegal traffic of radioactive materials. The main goal of the first direction of study is to improve the security of underground civilian and industrial infrastructures, by starting the development of a new, innovative detection system that can be used to identify potentially dangerous conditions using a non-invasive, totally safe method. The method proposed uses information provided by a device placed underground that measures directional cosmic muon flux and identifies anomalies produced by irregularities in the geological layers above. For the second direction of study, the method proposed is based on the detection and analysis of the cosmic muon flux. The high-density materials (uranium, lead—used for radiation shielding, etc.) cause a decrease in the directional muon flux. The detection system will be submerged underneath the ship that will be scanned, being able to locate illegal radioactive materials without exposing any personnel to radiation or contamination. Correlated with simulations based on the known configuration of the ship scanned, the data provided by the detection system will provide the location and dimensions of the undeclared material transported. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Cosmic-ray muography’.

Muography and Its Potential Applications to Mining and Rock Engineering

“…Up till now muography has been applied to or tested in many fields. For example, muography has been used in the imaging of volcanoes (Nagamine et al 1995;Tanaka et al 2007Tanaka et al , 2009Tanaka et al , 2014Okubo and Tanaka 2012;Lesparre et al 2012;Marteau et al 2012Marteau et al , 2015Shinohara and Tanaka 2012;Carlôganu et al 2013;Tanaka and Yokoyama 2013;Nishiyama et al 2014;Ambrosino et al 2015b;Jourde et al 2016;Tioukov et al 2017;Noli et al 2017;Kaiser 2019;D'Alessandro et al 2019;Oláh et al 2019;Tanaka 2019;Barnoud et al 2019;Lelièvre et al 2019), in mining exploration (Schouten 2019), in the imaging of underground structures (Bonneville et al 2019;Saracino et al 2019), in archaeology and tunnel detection (Basset et al 2006;Menichelli et al 2007;Levy et al 1988;Celmins 1990;Caffau et al1997;Morishima et al 2017), in the monitoring of carbon capture storage sites (Kudryavtsev et al 2012;Jiang et al 2013;Klinger et al 2015;Gluyas et al 2019), in scanning old mining sites to detect the possible presence of unknown cavities (Baccani et al 2019;Mitrica et al 2019), in investigation of mineral deposits and rock density measurements…”