Multidisciplinary applications of muon radiography using the MIMA detector

The MIMA muon tracker, developed by the INFN Unit of Florence and the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Florence, has been designed to test the application of muon radiography (or muography) to multidisciplinary case studies, to demonstrate its validity as an imaging tool in different fields and to develop dedicated data analysis strategies. The MIMA detector is a scaled-down version of the muon trackers developed for the "Mu-Ray" INFN R&D project and the MURAVES (MUon RAdiography of VESuvius) "Progetto Premiale", financed by the Italian government. Thanks to its compactness, MIMA allowed the use of slightly different technical solutions with respect to the other detectors. Its construction was completed in the first half of 2017 and since then it has been used for several different measurements. In the second half of 2017 the detector was installed in the Bourbon Gallery inside Mount Echia, a hill in the center of Naples containing a complicated system of tunnels and cavities that have been dug over many centuries. The installation of the MIMA tracker was required to validate with an independent detector the results obtained in two previous measurements by the Mu-Ray tracker. After this measurement, the detector has been used in the Tuscany region, mainly for investigating two possible fields of application: geo-hydrological risk assessment and mining activity. The preliminary results of these tests and the future perspectives are shortly presented in this paper.