Feasibility Study of a New Cherenkov Detector for Improving Volcano Muography.

Domenico Lo Presti,Santo Reito,Fabio Longhitano,Giuseppe Gallo,Daniele Bongiovanni,Danilo Bonanno

doi:10.3390/s19051183

Abstract

Muography is an expanding technique for internal structure investigation of large volume object, such as pyramids, volcanoes and also underground cavities. It is based on the attenuation of muon flux through the target in a way similar to the attenuation of X-ray flux through the human body for standard radiography. Muon imaging have to face with high background level, especially compared with the tiny near horizontal muon flux. In this paper the authors propose an innovative technique based on the measurement of Cherenkov radiation by Silicon photo-multipliers arrays to be integrated in a standard telescope for muography applications. Its feasibility study was accomplished by means of Geant4 simulations for the measurement of the directionality of cosmic-ray muons. This technique could be particularly useful for the suppression of background noise due to back-scattered particles whose incoming direction is likely to be wrongly reconstructed. The results obtained during the validation study of the technique principle confirm the ability to distinguish the arrival direction of muons with an efficiency higher than 98% above 1 GeV. In addition, a preliminary study on the tracking performance of the presented technique was introduced.

Highlights

Muon radiography—or briefly muography—is a promising technique which aims at resolving the internal structure of large size objects by taking advantages of the high penetrating power of cosmogenic muons
The innovative Cherenkov-tag detector was designed as a possible upgrade of the muon telescope already working, developed inside the Muography of Etna Volcano (MEV) project [15]
In sight of a possible upgrade for the MEV project telescope, with a sensitive area of 1 m2, the final Cherenkov tag detector will be composed of a square array of 16 single modules to cover the sensitive area

Summary

Introduction

Muon radiography—or briefly muography—is a promising technique which aims at resolving the internal structure of large size objects by taking advantages of the high penetrating power of cosmogenic muons. The properties of muons interaction with matter have been known for a long time, the investigation of their potential as a probe to give information of large structures is a recent development. The muography technique is based on the reconstruction of the incident direction of the detected muons after crossing the target object; for this purpose, a muography experiment requires a tracker detector with at least two position sensitive planes in order to reconstruct the particle trajectories. The detector is able to track particles which come from two sides, front and back, and their incoming direction could be distinguished from the slope of reconstructed trajectories, assuming that In last years it is possible to found an increasing number of papers discussing the application of muography to target as volcanoes, underground cavities, glaciers and pyramids with impressive results [3,4,5,6,7,8,9].

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