Investigation of deflection angle for muon energy classification in muon scattering tomography via GEANT4 simulations

TL;DR

This study uses GEANT4 simulations to analyze how deflection angles in muon scattering tomography vary with energy, proposing modifications to improve muon energy classification accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces the use of stainless steel surfaces to enhance deflection angles and reduce uncertainty in muon energy classification.

Findings

Deflection angle exponentially decreases with increasing muon energy.

Current detector setup has limitations for low-Z, low-density materials.

Adding stainless steel surfaces improves scattering signal and classification potential.

Abstract

In muon scattering tomography, the investigated materials are discriminated according to the scattering angle that mainly depends on the atomic number, the density, and the thickness of the medium at a given energy value. The scattering angles at different initial energies also provide the opportunity to classify the incoming muons into a number of energy groups. In this study, by employing the GEANT4 code, we show that the deflection angle exponentially decays as a function of energy, and the numerical values for the current configuration are below the detector accuracy except the initial energy bins owing to the low-Z, low density, and low thickness of the current plastic scintillators. This implies the necessity of additional components that provoke the muon scattering. Therefore, we introduce stainless steel surfaces into the top and bottom sections in order to amplify the deflection angle as well as to reduce the uncertainty, thereby improving the detector performance.