Abstract
Nuclear emulsions are currently being used in the field of muography, more specifically muon radiography of volcanic edifices and fault regions. The peculiar features of such detector for cosmic muons demand appropriate data processing and analysis techniques. The paper shows the current development status of readout devices and analysis techniques developed by some research groups that established a collaborative network in Italy and Japan. An overview is given of nuclear emulsion-based detectors, from the detection principles to detector operation and set-up techniques, in connection with the expectations in terms of geophysics information. Two systems for readout are presented, one developed in the first decade of the 21st century and one that is entering duty now. The evolution in terms of data quality and speed is discussed. Finally, the most relevant data processing steps that allow working out muon absorption maps from nuclear emulsion data are described.
Highlights
Nuclear emulsions have gained increasing interest over the last years as particle detectors for muon radiography
Another major improvement in speed comes from the stage drive technique, which is called continuous motion: the X axis is set to move at constant speed, while the Z axis cyclically descends during image acquisition and resets to the starting position
It is worth to mention that the cost of the upgrade from European Scanning System (ESS) to Quick Scanning System (QSS) is about 1⁄4 of the cost of the ESS
Summary
Nuclear emulsions have gained increasing interest over the last years as particle detectors for muon radiography (see e.g. Tanaka et al [2007a]). In order to filter out the electromagnetic (electrons/positrons) and soft component of the spectrum (muons with p < 1 GeV/c) one can add metal absorbers before and after the detector and by stacking films interleaved with spacers or dense scattering material In the latter case, as pointed out above, the multiple Coulomb scattering effect can be computed precisely, and soft tracks can be rejected on the basis of their estimated momentum, by properly adjusting the tolerances for track connection. Tracking is off-loaded to a factory of GPU-based tracking servers, which can run virtually any NVidia board (GTX 640, Tesla C2050, GTX 590, GTX 690, GTX 780 Ti and GTX Titan Black have been tested) Another major improvement in speed comes from the stage drive technique, which is called continuous motion: the X (or Y) axis is set to move at constant speed, while the Z axis cyclically descends during image acquisition and resets to the starting position. It is worth to mention that the cost of the upgrade from ESS to QSS is about 1⁄4 of the cost of the ESS
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