Discrimination of high-Z materials in concrete-filled containers using muon scattering tomography

An analysis method of identifying materials using muon scattering tomography is presented, which uses previous knowledge of the position of high-Z objects inside a container and distinguishes them from similar materials. In particular, simulations were performed in order to distinguish a block of Uranium from blocks of Lead and Tungsten of the same size, inside a concrete-filled drum. The results show that, knowing the shape and position from previous analysis, it is possible to distinguish 5 × 5 × 5 cm³ blocks of these materials with about 4h of muon exposure, down to 2 × 2 × 2 cm³ blocks with 70h of data using multivariate analysis (MVA). MVA uses several variables, but it does not benefit the discrimination over a simpler method using only the scatter angles. This indicates that the majority of discrimination is provided by the angular information. Momentum information is shown to provide no benefits in material discrimination.