MayaMuon Tomography at UTAustin

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MayaMuon Tomography at UTAustin

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Title: MayaMuon Tomography at UTAustin

1
Maya-Muon Tomography at UT-Austin

A most awesome albeit brief presentation by
Derrick L. Tucker

2
This is applied particle physics!

As opposed to those other presentations of
fundamental particle physics.

3
Cosmic-Ray Muon Tomography

What is it exactly?
It is effectively the use of a particle detector
to track cosmic-ray muon rates for the purpose of
computer-assisted image reconstruction.

4
In our case we track muon count rates at a
variety of different angles and locations.
Differences in the rates from different
directions indicates that the total mass of
material along these directions is thus
different, which we can then use, in theory, to
create tomographic images.
5
Why use muons for tomography?

Reason 3 - Relatively speaking, they live to a
ripe old age!

6
Why else?

Reason 2 - Taking into account time-dilation,
muons thus reach sea-level at an approximate rate
of 10,000 muons per square meter per minute.

7
The Final Reason

And Reason 1 - Energy loss is predominately by
ionization and thus is quantifiable.

8
A brief aside, but where do these muons come from?

In the atmosphere, muons are produced as the
secondary decay products of mostly protons (sent
from countless explosions and other such
activities beyond our solar disc) interacting
with nuclei in the atmosphere. These
interactions produce pions and kaons, the charged
variety of which then decay into muons.

9
Illustrative Diagram of Muon Production from Pion
10
The Detector Herself

Isnt she beautiful!

11
One more picture, complete with beautiful people!
12
General Detector Structure
13
Scintillator

Extruded polystyrene
Fluoresces when a charged particle passes through
it
Coated with white paint to contain light within
the strip
Carries a groove down the center to house WLS
fiber

14
FEBs/PMTs

The PMTs collect light from the WLS fibers and
feed these via the circuit board to the front-end
boards (FEBs) in order to digitize the
information.

15
3 Types of FEB signals

Synch
Configuration
Data-Transfer

16
And then . . .

All these signals then get routed to the Compact
Rio (or simply the Rio), which adds timing
information in the form of a 40 Mhz clock before
feeding said information to an external computer.

17
The Detector, the Muon, and the Pyramid
18
Basic Scheme

Muons travel through atmosphere
Muons interact with the rock/ground/pyramid
Muons then strike the detector
Hits then get counted and (eventually)
reconstructed into an image

19
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20
Current Work

In order to track muon events we are critically
interested in discerning triplets.
A triplet is simply a series of hit strips, one
on each layer, that overlaps at a point.

21
Discerning Triplets

An event is determined by two triplets, an entry
triplet and an exit triplet.

22
Offline Software

The offline software, post-Rio, is used at this
point to reject spurious events and noise and,
through algorithms outlined in my term paper,
determine the best entry and exit triplets. The
quantity describing the best triplets is the
quantity, with a lower value representing a
better triplet.
For more information please read my stellar term
paper . . .

23
Offline Software Cont.

Offline software is developed using C
preliminarily in MatLab before being ported and
updated in Geant4, a toolkit developed at CERN
for particle interaction simulation.

24
2-D Triplet Display
25
Current Work Part DuexTriplets and Doublets

Our most current work (i.e. this past weekend
current) involves resolving triplets and doublets
in order to increase number of events we can use
to reconstruct events.

26
Triplet/Doublet Discernment

There must be one triplet associated with said
doublet.
The triplet strike must be clean, that is to
say that not many associated strips can be struck.

27
Future Goals

Finish detector construction
Continue testing triplet algorithms and (very
soon) do some rudimentary test imaging
Go to Belize and image the internals of Mayan
pyramids

28
And . . .