Abstract
Muon absorption radiography is an imaging technique based on the measurement of the absorption of cosmic ray muons. This technique has recently been used successfully to investigate the presence of unknown cavities in the Bourbon Gallery in Naples and in the Chephren Pyramid at Cairo. The MIMA detector (Muon Imaging for Mining and Archaeology) is a prototype muon tracker for muon radiography for application in the fields of archaelogy and mining. It is made of three pairs of X-Y planes each consisting of 21 scintillator bars with a silicon photomultiplier readout. The detector is compact, robust, easily transportable, and has a low power consumption: all of which makes the detector ideal for measurements in confined and isolated environments. With this detector, a measurement from inside the Temperino mine in the San Silvestro archaeo-mining park in Tuscany was performed. The park includes about 25 km of mining tunnels arranged on several levels that have been exploited from the Etruscan time. The measured muon absorption was compared to the simulated one, obtained from the information provided by 3D laser scanner measurements and cartographic maps of the mountain above the mine, in order to obtain information about the average density of the rock. This allowed one to confirm the presence of a partially accessible exploitation opening and provided some hints regarding the presence of a high-density body within the rock.
Highlights
When primary cosmic rays enter the atmosphere, they produce showers of secondary particles, including mesons such as pions and kaons, which can decay into muons
Muons are low-interacting particles, and this allows for their use in radiographic measurements
Muon radiography is similar to X-ray radiography: it is a non-invasive imaging technique that can be used to measure the mean density of matter along a line of sight
Summary
When primary cosmic rays enter the atmosphere, they produce showers of secondary particles, including mesons such as pions and kaons, which can decay into muons. The muon flux measured in different directions is compared to that obtained by simulating the particles’ propagation through the structure under study, reconstructing the two-dimensional density profile of the traversed matter This muon radiography technique was exploited for the first time in 1955 to determine the rock overburden on a mountain tunnel [2]. In 1970, the Nobelist Louis Alvarez and his collaborators performed a radiographic measurement of the Chephren Pyramid in Egypt and they were able to exclude the existence of a hidden burial chamber [3] Following these pioneering measurements, more recently muon absorption radiography was taken again into consideration, at first by Japanese groups [4] and later by Italian, French, Canadian, American, and other groups ([5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13], to name a few) for application in the fields of volcanology, archaeology, and mining. A large void in the Cheops Pyramid in Cairo has been discovered by the ScanPyramids collaboration using the muography technique [13]
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