Cosmic ray radiation is mostly composed, at sea level, by high energy muons, which are highly penetrating particles capable of crossing kilometers of rock. Cosmic ray radiation constituted the first source of projectiles used to investigate the intim
ate structure of matter and is currently and largely used for particle detector test and calibration. The ubiquitous and steady presence at the Earths surface and the high penetration capability has motivated the use of cosmic ray radiation also in fields beyond particle physics, from geological and archaeological studies to industrial applications and civil security. In the present paper, cosmic ray muon detection techniques are assessed for stability monitoring applications in the field of civil engineering, in particular for static monitoring of historical buildings, where conservation constraints are more severe and the time evolution of the deformation phenomena under study may be of the order of months or years. As a significant case study, the monitoring of the wooden vaulted roof of the Palazzo della Loggia in the town of Brescia, in Italy, has been considered. The feasibility as well as the performances and limitations of a monitoring system based on cosmic ray tracking, in the considered case, have been studied by Monte Carlo simulation and discussed in comparison with more traditional monitoring systems. Requirements for muon detectors suitable for this particular application, as well as the results of some preliminary tests on a muon detector prototype based on scintillating fibers and silicon photomultipliers SiPM are presented.
The muon tomography technique, based on multiple Coulomb scattering of cosmic ray muons, has been proposed as a tool to detect the presence of high density objects inside closed volumes. In this paper a new and innovative method is presented to handl
e the density fluctuations (noise) of reconstructed images, a well known problem of this technique. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated using experimental data obtained with a muon tomography prototype located at the Legnaro National Laboratories (LNL) of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). The results reported in this paper, obtained with real cosmic ray data, show that with appropriate image filtering and muon momentum classification, the muon tomography technique can detect high density materials, such as lead, albeit surrounded by light or medium density material, in short times. A comparison with algorithms published in literature is also presented.
The creation of a hypernucleus requires the injection of strangeness into the nucleus. This is possible in different ways, mainly using pi+ or K- beams on fixed targets. A review of hypernuclei production by K- at rest is here presented. When a K- st
ops inside a nucleus it can undergo the so called strangeness-exchange reaction, in which a neutron is replaced by a Lambda with the emission of a pion. By precisely studying the outgoing pions both the binding energy and the formation probability of the hypernuclei can be measured. New measurements from the FINUDA experiment on 7Li, 9Be, 13C and 16O, coupled with previous measurements on 12C and 16O, allowed for the first time the study of the formation of hypernuclei as a function of the atomic mass number A. The new measurements also offered the possibility of disentangling the effects due to atomic wave-function of the captured K- from those due to the pion optical nuclear potential and from those due to the specific hypernuclear states. These new results on the study of the hypernuclei production by K- at rest are here presented and discussed.
The formation of the antihydrogen beam in the AEGIS experiment through the use of inhomogeneous electric fields is discussed and simulation results including the geometry of the apparatus and realistic hypothesis about the antihydrogen initial condit
ions are shown. The resulting velocity distribution matches the requirements of the gravity experiment. In particular it is shown that the inhomogeneous electric fields provide radial cooling of the beam during the acceleration.
