Design of a new muon tomography system using a three-layered tacker

Abstract

Muon tomography system is a widely used passive detection technique for material identification and 3D image reconstruction. A conventional muon-tomography system consists of two muon trackers placed at the top and bottom of the imaging volume. A muon tracker comprises several layers of a 1D detector array composed of scintillator bars or gas-electron multipliers. However, the computational expense and complexity of the system may rise as the number of layers in a muon tracker increases. Here, we propose the new design of a muon tomography system using a three-layer muon tracker consisting of plastic scintillator bars coupled to SiPMs. The layers are rotated by 45° around the same axis. Each layer is composed of the 1D detector arrays coupled to a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) at one end. The 3D reconstruction image and material identification of four different materials of identical size can be obtained using the GEANT4 simulation toolkit. Based on these results, the proposed new muon tomography system will be feasible for future passive detection purposes.

Keywords

• Muon tomography
• Point of closest approach
• Muon tracking method
• Muon tracker