Energy difference between hodoscope sections in muon tomography:
Application for nuclear waste barrels by means of GEANT4 simulations
Abstract
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.