Speaker
Description
In the 1950s, E. P. George measured the penetrating muon rates to gauge the overburden densities over a tunnel in Australia. Later in 1969, Luis Alvarez pioneered muon tomographic imaging by staging a spark chamber in the second pyramid of Chephren in Giza, Egypt. A quarter century after Alvarez, the MACRO collaboration measured the subterranean muon angular distribution that characterized the Apennine mountains over the Gran Sasso Laboratory. In the intervening period up to the present, muon tomography has benefited from improvements in detector technology, including scintillator materials, photodetection, and data processing. Muon tomography is maturing to a point where it might be used reliably for subsurface imaging of geological or mechanical structures. This presentation reports on a new pilot project organized at Tel Aviv University for radiographic imaging in a biblical-era archaeological site adjacent to the southern flank of the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel. A 40 x 40 x 40 cm³ detector, consisting of four layers of interleaved extruded plastic scintillators produced at FNAL and read out by a Hamamatsu silicon photomultiplier array, has been staged in a cave near the Gihon Spring. The objective is to search for muon flux anomalies that may indicate the presence of subterranean water conduits from antiquity.
