The Muon Portal Double Tracker for the Inspection of Travelling Containers

Abstract

The Muon Portal Project has as its goal the design and construction of a real-size working detector prototype in scale 1:1, to inspect the content of travelling containers by means of the secondary cosmic-ray muon radiation and to recognize high-Z hidden materials (i.e. U, Pu). The tomographic image is obtained by reconstructing the input and output trajectories of each muon when it crosses the container and, consequently, the scattering angle, making use of two trackers placed above and below the container. The scan is performed without adding any external radiation, in a reasonable time (few minutes) and with a good spatial and angular resolution. The detector consists of 8 planes each segmented in 6 identical modules. Each module is made of scintillating strips with two WaveLength Shifting fibers (WLS) inside, coupled to Silicon photomultipliers. The customized read-out electronics employs programmable boards. Thanks to a smart read-out system, the number of output channels is reduced by a factor 10. The signals from the front-end modules are sent to the read-out boards, in order to convert analog signals to digital ones, by comparison with a threshold. The data are pre-analyzed and stored into a data acquisition PC. After an intense measurement and simulation campaign to carefully characterize the detector components, the first detection modules ( $1 \times 3 ~\hbox{m}^{2}$ ) have been already built. In this paper the detector architecture, particularly focusing on the used electronics and the main preliminary results will be presented.