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The UT Maya Muon Project: Seeing Through Dirt and Rocks with Cosmic Ray Muons
Roy Schwitters talks at MIT Colloquium
Roy Schwitters of the University of Texas at Austin gave a talk on February 28th, 2011 at the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science’s Nuclear and Particle Physics Colloquium entitled “The UT Maya Muon Project: Seeing Through Dirt and Rocks with Cosmic Ray Muons.”
The University of Texas Maya Muon Project is an effort by UT students, staff, and faculty to develop practical methods to investigate large structures of archeological interest using muon tomography. Plans to explore the ruin of a Maya pyramid in Belize using muons, the predominant component of naturally occurring cosmic rays at and below the Earth’s surface, will be described.
Muon tomography was pioneered by Luis Alvarez in the 1960s to explore the Second Pyramid of Chephren in Egypt. Improvements in detector technology and advances in tomographic imaging since the Alvarez experiment suggest that muon tomography may be a practical method for exploring and monitoring large underground volumes—pyramids, aquifers, bank vaults, and more—when long exposure times, on the order of weeks to months, are acceptable.
Practical detectors based on developments in high-energy physics have been built and are being tested against a range of “blind” targets. Results of these tests were presented.