• Corpus ID: 246473182

Towards a portable high-resolution muon detector based on Resistive Plate Chambers

@inproceedings{Basnet2022TowardsAP,
  title={Towards a portable high-resolution muon detector based on Resistive Plate Chambers},
  author={S. Basnet and Eduardo Cortina Gil and Pavel Evgen'evich Demin and Ran M. I. D. Gamage and Andrea Giammanco and Raveendrababu Karnam and Marwa Moussawi and Amrutha Samalan and Michael Tytgat},
  year={2022}
}

• S. Basnet, E. Gil, +6 authors M. Tytgat
• Published 2 February 2022
• Physics

The use of conventional imaging techniques becomes problematic when faced with challenging logistics and confined environments. In particular, such scenarios are not unusual in the field of archaeological and mining explorations as well as for nuclear waste characterization. For these applications, even the use of muography is complicated since the detectors have to be deployed in difficult areas with limited room for instrumentation, e.g., narrow tunnels. To address this limitation, we have developed a portable muon detector (muoscope) based on glass Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC) with an active area of 16 × 16 cm. The specific design goals taken into consideration while developing our first prototype are portability, robustness, autonomy, versatility, safety and low cost. After gaining building and operating experience with the first prototype, We are currently in the process of developing an improved second prototype. In line with our design goals, we also study the possibility to switch the sensitive units from strips in the old prototype to pixels for the new one. This will help further improve our design goal of portability by reducing the overall weight of the setup by half since a single RPC layer provides bi-dimensional information with pixels. However, for performing high resolution muography, the number of readout units per layer will also need to increase significantly, leading to increase in the overall cost and power consumption of the muoscope. To mitigate these issues, we are developing a novel 2D multiplexing algorithm for reading out several pixels with a 1 ar X iv :2 20 2. 01 08 4v 1 [ ph ys ic s. in sde t] 2 F eb 2 02 2 single electronic channel. In this article, we give an overview of the detector development, focusing mainly on the design goals and the choice of detector technology. Furthermore, we present the details of the expected changes in the new prototype as well as a simulated 2D multiplexing study based on general principles. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Cosmic-Ray Muography (Muography2021), 24-26 Nov. 2022 at Ghent, Belgium. Submitted to Journal for Advanced Instrumentation in Science.