2024 Abstracts from Akshay and DJ

Double Pulse Analysis for Cosmic Ray Muon Detectors

Student: Daniel Mason Jr.

Scientist: Mark Adams

It has come to our attention that there were inconsistencies in some of the muon pulse readouts from detectors placed around our office. My mentor describes these inconsistencies as double pulse events. Normally, when a muon is detected it creates a pulse readout. But occasionally there will be double pulse events where instead of one standard sized pulse there are 2 much smaller pulses separated by a very small gap in time. The hypothesis was that these double pulse events were actually normal pulses but the detectors were separating them into 2 sections. We first looked at how common these events are. While the percentages ranged from 16% to 10% between detectors the average was around 14%. This was a very high percentage and far too high for it not to be a hardware issue. We then compared various parameters of the double pulses between the different detectors. All seem to be very similar with slight variation. Finally, I looked at the pulse width of detectors 1 and 3. Both seem to have similar upward nanosecond limits of around 50 but the double pulse instances never seem to go below 15 nanoseconds in total pulse width. Overall due to their high percentages, we concluded that the anomalies were hardware based and that the pulse width seemed to be different for the double pulse events than the normal ones.

Horizontal Cosmic Ray Muon Rate Detection with Emphasis on Removal of Background Noise

Students: Akshay Naik & Daniel Mason Jr.

Scientist: Mark Adams

Muons have the potential to be used for non-invasive imagery. In 1970, Alvarez and his team searched for hidden chambers within the pyramids of Giza. Their experiment proved that while it was possible and the technology worked, there were not any chambers in the pyramid. Now with more robust technology we attempt to use the cosmic ray muons to find hidden chambers within the Chichen Itza pyramids.

An important aspect with the detection of hidden chambers is isolation of the directional cosmic ray muons. Attempting to determine the direction of the muons requires multiple scintillating detectors. Detecting directional muons on each of the detectors is a simple process, but isolating the directional muons from background cosmic showers is difficult.

There are many ways to isolate what we need from the background. Having “veto” detectors horizontal on top of the directional detectors is crucial to isolating the background. By detecting muons that travel through the veto detector and the directional detector we are able to remove the muons from data and hence we have isolated the directional muons.

Additionally, background muon noise can be further isolated by having the distance between the detectors increased. This in turn causes the cone of acceptance to shrink and the total muons detected reduce. Finally, a third way to isolate the muons is to realize that the background muon showers will all hit the detectors at the same time, and will therefore have a time difference of 0 seconds and a unimodal peak. We have determined many ways to isolate the background muons from the directional muons and we hope to implement these findings in our study.

Fixing 3D viewer for the Implementation of Cosmic Ray Muon Tomography at Chichen Itza Pyramids

Students: Akshay Naik & Daniel Mason Jr.

Scientist: Mark Adams

In order for the successful implementation of the cosmic ray muon experiment in Chichen Itza we require there to be a 3D event display to view all of the data. The objectives for the testing included: 1. Making sure that the detector could be rotated to any needed orientation. 2. Making sure the detector could be moved to any orientation. 3. Making sure the program could handle an immense amount of data intake.

During testing it was discovered that the detector and the pyramid wire display were linked together. This meant that you could not move the detector independent of the pyramid, effectively meaning that you could not move the detector. To fix this, the decoupling of the detector and pyramid coordinate systems had to happen. Once this was fixed, the pyramid stood at the origin and the detector was able to move freely around it. This is a massive step in order to achieve the visualization that we need as in real life when the experiment is conducted, we will need to be able to move the detector anywhere.

Additionally, when we tested the rotation of the detector we found a lot of issues. When we rotate in two planes, the detector did not rotate properly as the order of the rotations caused the second rotation to be rotated around a shifted plane. This was fixed by changing the order of the rotations within the code. Now, it rotates in the phi direction and then the theta direction, whereas before it rotated in the other direction. This is a crucial step as by visualizing the rotation correctly we are able to accurately visualize the muon path in the 3D viewer.

Finally, testing the data intake capacity was done through the creation of over 300 fake events. These events were made to the detector in all forms, from simple vertical events to events going across the entirety of the detector. Our findings indicate that there is not a limit to the amount of data that the program can handle. Overall, we have improved the 3D event display software and made it usable for the real-life implementation of the cosmic ray Chichen Itza experiment.