Optimizing the Tracking Efficiency for Cosmic Ray Muon Tomography

Abstract

We have built a detector capable of locating high Z objects in the sampling (middle) region of the detector. As atomic number increases, radiation length rapidly decreases, yielding larger variance in scattering angle. Cosmic ray muon tomography works by tracking muons above the sampling region, and tracking them below the region as well. The difference between the two trajectories yield information, via the muon scattering variance, of the materials contained within the sampling region[1]. One of most important aspects of cosmic ray tomography is minimizing exposure time. The cosmic ray flux is about 1/cm\^2/min, and the goal is to use them for detecting high-density materials as quickly as possible. This involves using all of the information possible to reconstruct tracks with redundant detectors. Detector scattering residuals yield a low precision measurement of muon energy. Knowing the rough energy of an incoming particle will yield more precisely the expected scattering variance (currently the expectation value of ~3GeV is used).