MRPC technology for muon tomography

Abstract

Muon tomography is an innovative high-Z material detection technology developed in recent years. The most crucial part of this technology is the high position resolution detectors used for the muon track reconstruction. Multi-Gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs in the following) are gaseous detectors first developed at CERN in middle 1990s. Considering their characteristics in terms of high efficiency, low cost, robust structure, and excellent position resolution, MRPC became the detector of choice for the TUMUTY (Tsinghua University cosmic ray muon tomography facility) system built in 2012. This paper features a summary about the latest developments on MRPC technology for muon tomography. After the success of the TUMUTY prototype, researches were carried out on larger sensitive area position resolution MRPCs with 2-D readout, and on environment-friendly sealed MRPCs (SMRPC) for industrial applications and future muon tomography systems. It was studied how encoding readout methods and external environment influence the performance of MRPC detectors. Also, an MRPC simulation frame and new data processing methods were both developed, which have provided useful information on optimal design of the future position resolution MRPCs and muon tracking systems.