Abstract
The Muon Portal Project [1] is a joint initiative between research and industrial partners, aimed at the construction of a real size detector protoype to search for hidden high-Z fissile materials inside containers by the muon scattering technique. The detector is based on a set of 48 detection modules (1 m × 3 m), so as to provide four X-Y detection planes, two placed above and two below the container to be inspected. After a research and development phase, which led to the choice and test of the individual components, the construction of the full size detector has already started and will be completed in a few months.
Highlights
An estimate of about 200 million containers are traveling each year through the custom borders of many countries
A new Project was recently started by the Muon Portal Collaboration [1] with the goal to build a real size detector (18 m2 sensitive area for each plane) with all potential features to be used in a real situation to probe the interior of a standard 20’ container
The silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) prototype designed for the Muon Portal Project had to maximize the photon detection efficiency and the cell fill factor, as well as to ensure a low cross-talk and dark count rate
Summary
An estimate of about 200 million containers are traveling each year through the custom borders of many countries. They are in principle potential sources of small quantities of hidden nuclear material, such as fissile elements. For a detection system employing such technique (muon tomography) a large area muon detector is required, to reconstruct the muon tracks with good angular resolution before and after traversing the container volume. Different Projects have been exploited over the past years, aiming at building prototype detectors for muon tomography. They differ in the sensitive area and in the details of the detection technique employed. Different reconstruction and visualization algorithms have been implemented and have demonstrated the feasibility of this Project, with several papers reporting specific aspects [3,4,5,6,7,8]
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