The possibility to exploit the muon scattering for the elemental discrimination of materials in a given volume is well known. When more than one material is present along the muon path, it is often important to discern the order in which they are stacked. The scattering angle due to the target volume can be split into two interior angles in the tomo-graphic setups based on the muon scattering, and we call this property as the triangular correlation where the sum of these two interior angles is equal to the scattering angle. In this study, we apply this triangular correlation for a multi-block material configuration that consist of concrete, stainless steel, and uranium. By changing the order of this material set, we employ the GEANT4 simulations and we show that the triangular correlation is valid in the multi-block material setups, thereby providing the possibility of supportive information for the coarse prediction of the material order in such configurations.

The propagating muons deposit their energies in the volume-of-interest (VOI) within the tomographic configurations, and this energy loss directly indicates that there is a difference in terms of the kinetic energy between the incoming muons and the the outgoing muons. In this study, by using the GEANT4 simulations, we first elaborate this energy difference over the nuclear waste barrels that contain cobalt, strontium, caesium, uranium, and plutonium. We show that the deposited energy through these VOIs is not negligible for the initial energy bins. Then, we suggest a correction factor for the image reconstruction codes where the initial kinetic energy of the entering muons is coarsely predicted in accordance with the deflection angle through the hodoscope sections, thereby renormalizing the deflection angle in the bottom hodoscope depending on the intrinsic properties of the corresponding VOIs. This correction factor encompasses useful information about the target volume traversed by the muons since it is related to the intrinsic features of the VOI. Therefore, it might be utilized in order to complement the scattering information as an input to the image reconstruction.

The possibility to exploit the muon scattering for the elemental discrimination of materials in a given volume is well known. When more than one material is present along the muon path, it is often important to discern the order in which they are stacked. The scattering angle due to the target volume can be split into two interior angles in the tomographic setups based on the muon scattering, and we call this property as the triangular correlation where the sum of these two interior angles is equal to the scattering angle. In this study, we apply this triangular correlation for a multi-block material configuration that consist of concrete, stainless steel, and uranium. By changing the order of this material set, we employ the GEANT4 simulations and we show that the triangular correlation is valid in the multi-block material setups, thereby providing the possibility of supportive information for the coarse prediction of the material order in such configurations.

The preliminary information about the muon tracking by means of the GEANT4 simulations is summarized in accordance with the physics reference manual of GEANT4 10.7.