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Muon tomography
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Muon tomography
Muon tomography or muography is a technique that uses cosmic ray muons to generate two or three-dimensional images of volumes using information contained in the Coulomb scattering of the muons. Since muons are much more deeply penetrating than X-rays, muon tomography can be used to image through much thicker material than x-ray based tomography such as CT scanning. The muon flux at the Earth's surface is such that a single muon passes through an area the size of a human hand per second.
Since its development in the 1950s, muon tomography has taken many forms, the most important of which are muon transmission radiography and muon scattering tomography. Since 2010s researchers are also exploring and attempting to use artificially generated muons—created by conventional accelerators or laser-plasma systems—for muon tomography.
Muography uses muons by tracking the number of muons that pass through the target volume to determine the density of the inaccessible internal structure. Muography is a technique similar in principle to radiography (imaging with X-rays) but capable of surveying much larger objects. Since muons are less likely to interact, stop and decay in low density matter than high density matter, a larger number of muons will travel through the low density regions of target objects in comparison to higher density regions. The apparatus records the trajectory of each event to produce a muogram that displays the matrix of the resulting numbers of transmitted muons after they have passed through objects up to multiple kilometers in thickness. The internal structure of the object, imaged in terms of density, is displayed by converting muograms to muographic images.
Muon tomography imagers are under development for the purposes of detecting nuclear material in road transport vehicles and cargo containers for the purposes of non-proliferation. Another application is the usage of muon tomography to monitor potential underground sites used for carbon sequestration.
The term muon tomography is based on the word "tomography", a word produced by combining Ancient Greek tomos "cut" and graphe "drawing." The technique produces cross-sectional images (not projection images) of large-scaled objects that cannot be imaged with conventional radiography.[citation needed] Some authors hence see this modality as a subset of muography.
Muography was named by Hiroyuki K. M. Tanaka. There are two explanations for the origin of the word "muography": (A) a combination of the elementary particle muon and Greek γραφή (graphé) "drawing," together suggesting the meaning "drawing with muons"; and (B) a shortened combination of "muon" and "radiography." Although these techniques are related, they differ in that radiography uses X-rays to image the inside of objects on the scale of meters, while muography uses muons to image the inside of objects on the scale of hectometers to kilometers.
Twenty years after Carl David Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer discovered that muons were generated from cosmic rays in 1936, Australian physicist E.P. George made the first known attempt to measure the areal density of the rock overburden of the Guthega-Munyang tunnel (part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme) with cosmic ray muons. He used a Geiger counter. Although he succeeded in measuring the areal density of rock overburden placed above the detector, and even successfully matched the result from core samples, due to the lack of directional sensitivity in the Geiger counter, imaging was impossible.
In a famous experiment in the 1960s, American physicist Luis Walter Alvarez used muon transmission imaging to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Chephren in Giza, although none were found at the time; a later effort discovered a previously unknown void in the Great Pyramid. In all cases the information about the absorption of the muons was used as a measure of the thickness of the material crossed by the cosmic ray particles.
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Muon tomography AI simulator
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Muon tomography
Muon tomography or muography is a technique that uses cosmic ray muons to generate two or three-dimensional images of volumes using information contained in the Coulomb scattering of the muons. Since muons are much more deeply penetrating than X-rays, muon tomography can be used to image through much thicker material than x-ray based tomography such as CT scanning. The muon flux at the Earth's surface is such that a single muon passes through an area the size of a human hand per second.
Since its development in the 1950s, muon tomography has taken many forms, the most important of which are muon transmission radiography and muon scattering tomography. Since 2010s researchers are also exploring and attempting to use artificially generated muons—created by conventional accelerators or laser-plasma systems—for muon tomography.
Muography uses muons by tracking the number of muons that pass through the target volume to determine the density of the inaccessible internal structure. Muography is a technique similar in principle to radiography (imaging with X-rays) but capable of surveying much larger objects. Since muons are less likely to interact, stop and decay in low density matter than high density matter, a larger number of muons will travel through the low density regions of target objects in comparison to higher density regions. The apparatus records the trajectory of each event to produce a muogram that displays the matrix of the resulting numbers of transmitted muons after they have passed through objects up to multiple kilometers in thickness. The internal structure of the object, imaged in terms of density, is displayed by converting muograms to muographic images.
Muon tomography imagers are under development for the purposes of detecting nuclear material in road transport vehicles and cargo containers for the purposes of non-proliferation. Another application is the usage of muon tomography to monitor potential underground sites used for carbon sequestration.
The term muon tomography is based on the word "tomography", a word produced by combining Ancient Greek tomos "cut" and graphe "drawing." The technique produces cross-sectional images (not projection images) of large-scaled objects that cannot be imaged with conventional radiography.[citation needed] Some authors hence see this modality as a subset of muography.
Muography was named by Hiroyuki K. M. Tanaka. There are two explanations for the origin of the word "muography": (A) a combination of the elementary particle muon and Greek γραφή (graphé) "drawing," together suggesting the meaning "drawing with muons"; and (B) a shortened combination of "muon" and "radiography." Although these techniques are related, they differ in that radiography uses X-rays to image the inside of objects on the scale of meters, while muography uses muons to image the inside of objects on the scale of hectometers to kilometers.
Twenty years after Carl David Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer discovered that muons were generated from cosmic rays in 1936, Australian physicist E.P. George made the first known attempt to measure the areal density of the rock overburden of the Guthega-Munyang tunnel (part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme) with cosmic ray muons. He used a Geiger counter. Although he succeeded in measuring the areal density of rock overburden placed above the detector, and even successfully matched the result from core samples, due to the lack of directional sensitivity in the Geiger counter, imaging was impossible.
In a famous experiment in the 1960s, American physicist Luis Walter Alvarez used muon transmission imaging to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Chephren in Giza, although none were found at the time; a later effort discovered a previously unknown void in the Great Pyramid. In all cases the information about the absorption of the muons was used as a measure of the thickness of the material crossed by the cosmic ray particles.