Material Identification with Cosmic Ray Muons using RPCs

Abstract

We plan to build an imaging setup for material identification utilizing the\nCoulomb scattering of cosmic ray muons due to their interaction with the\nmaterials and tracking their trajectories with RPCs. To begin with, we consider\na setup of six RPCs stacked in a parallel manner to read the position and\ntiming information of the muons before and after their interaction with a\nphantom of a given material using a set of three RPCs for each phase. Here we\npresent a simulation work carried out to study the image formation of the\nphantom of several materials using the present setup. A detailed modeling of\nthe imaging system consisting of six RPCs was done using GEANT4. Cosmic Ray\nLibrary (CRY) was used for generation of particles with the appropriate\ndistribution of energies and momenta. Three reconstruction algorithms were\nfollowed for material identification and image reconstruction, viz. Point of\nClosest Approach (POCA), Iterative POCA and the Binned Clustering Algorithm. A\nweighted metric discriminator was calculated for target object identification.\nUsing the algorithms, the imaging of the area of interest lying between the two\nlayers of RPCs was done. The time required to discriminate target objects and\ndo the image reconstruction has been studied.\n