Towards portable muography with small-area, gas-tight glass Resistive Plate Chambers

TL;DR

This paper presents a portable muography detector using sealed, small-area glass-RPC planes, demonstrating its potential for diverse applications and discussing design innovations and future improvements.

Contribution

Introduces a compact, sealed glass-RPC detector for muography, enhancing portability and safety for underground and confined space imaging.

Findings

Successful construction of a small, sealed glass-RPC muography detector

Operational experience demonstrating detector's portability and safety

Future design improvements with serigraphy resistive coating

Abstract

Imaging techniques that use atmospheric muons, collectively named under the neologism "muography", have seen a tremendous growth in recent times, mainly due to their diverse range of applications. The most well-known ones include but are not limited to: volcanology, archaeology, civil engineering, nuclear reactor monitoring, nuclear waste characterization, underground mapping, etc. These methods are based on the attenuation or deviation of muons to image large and/or dense objects where conventional techniques cannot work or their use becomes challenging. In this context, we have constructed a muography telescope based on "mini glass-RPC planes" following a design similar to the glass-RPC detectors developed by the CALICE Collaboration and used by the TOMUVOL experiment in the context of volcano radiography, but with smaller active area (16 $\times$ 16 cm$^{2}$). The compact size makes it an attractive choice with respect to other detectors previously employed for imaging on similar scales. An important innovation in this design is that the detectors are sealed. This makes the detector more portable and solves the usual safety and logistic issues for gas detectors operated underground and/or inside small rooms. This paper provides an overview on our guiding principles, the detector development and our operational experiences. Drawing on the lessons learnt from the first prototype, we also discuss our future direction for an improved second prototype, focusing primarily on a recently adopted serigraphy technique for the resistive coating of the glass plates.