Industrial radiography with cosmic-ray muons: A progress report

Abstract

Cosmic-ray produced muons arrive at the surface of the earth with enormous energies ranging up to 10 12 GeV . There have been sporadic attempts to exploit their extreme penetration through matter to probe the internal structures of very large objects, including an Egyptian pyramid and a volcano but their very low intensity per unit area ( ≈ 1 cm - 2 per min) generally restricts the practicably attainable spatial resolution to large dimensions. Nevertheless the more intense low energy region of the muon spectrum has recently been shown to be capable of detecting high-Z objects with dimensions of the order of 10 cm hidden inside large transport containers in measurement times of minutes. These various developments have encouraged further studies of potential industrial uses of cosmic-ray muons in industrial applications. In order to gain maximum benefit from the low muon flux large area detectors are required and plastic scintillators offer useful advantages in size, cost and simplicity. Scintillator slabs up to 1 m 2 square and 76.2 mm thick are undergoing testing for applications in the nuclear industry. The most direct approach employs photomultiplier tubes at each corner to measure the relative sizes of muon induced pulses to determine the location of each muon track passing through the scintillator. The performance of this technique is reported and its imaging potential is assessed.