Muography: overview and future directions

Abstract

One contribution of 21 to a Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Cosmic-ray muography'.Cosmic-ray muography uses high-energy particles for imaging applications that are produced by cosmic rays in particle showers in the Earth's atmosphere. This technology has developed rapidly over the last 15 years, and it is currently branching out into many different applications and moving from academic research to commercial application. As in any new sub-field of research and technology, the nomenclature of the field itself is still developing and has not settled yet as new aspects of the field are appearing and with them the terms to describe them. This overview of the field of muography is not going to focus on the physics, on the reconstruction algorithms or on the involved detector technology. Detailed papers on these aspects are included in this issue of Philosophical Transactions A and I will refer to them. Instead, I will give an overview of the field as it is now, in 2018, and try to give an idea of the future directions in this field as I see them.This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Cosmic-ray muography'.

Atmospheric muons as an imaging tool

“…We reviewed the fundamental aspects and the state of the art of muography, showing how concepts that have their origin in particle physics are finding applications in the study of natural or man-made structures. Recent years have seen a rapid growth in the number of academic papers on the subject, as well as patents and commercialization attempts [14], as several detector and analysis breakthroughs now allow an effective transition from "proof of principle" to mature applications.…”

Muography and Its Potential Applications to Mining and Rock Engineering

“…Properties and characteristics of muons can be found in many publications (e.g., Tanaka 2013;Holma et al 2019;Kaiser 2019;Yang et al 2019) and their main physical properties and other characteristics can be summarized, as follows:…”

“…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…”

The Nuclear Legacy Today of Fukushima

“…Muon imaging makes use of muons, which are produced by cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere, to create images of objects (54). Muon imaging has become famous in the search for hidden chambers in the Egyptian pyramids, the mapping of volcanoes, and more recently in the attempt to image the internal structures of the Florence Cathedral (55-58).…”