The application of muon tomography to the imaging of railway tunnels

Abstract

Cosmic Ray Muon Radiography utilizes highly-penetrating cosmic ray muons to image the density profile of an object of interest. Here we report on the first trial to use a portable field-deployable cosmic ray tracking system in order to image the whole overburden of a UK railway tunnel with short duration scans (c. 30 minutes). A unknown overburden void was identified and, post-trial, confirmed by railway authorities. These experiments demonstrate the identification of hidden construction shafts with high levels of statistical significance as density anomalies within the data.