HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS MUOGRAPHY LAB @ UIUC

Our Lab's Work

The High Energy Physics Muography Group at UIUC is working in collaboration Occidental College, and supported by KoBold Metals, to design and manufacture cosmic-ray detectors to be used for sub-surface imaging technology. These detectors are constructed with a plastic material called a scintillator. This is a type of material that emits light when it is struck by charged particles. This scintillation light is converted into an electrical signal which can be read to understand the incoming muon flux.

Our Technology: Muon Tomography

Everyday, subatomic particles are colliding with the Earth's atmosphere. When these collisions occur, they produce cosmic air showers, massive particle showers which rain down onto Earth. Within these showers are particles called muons which penetrate deep into the Earth's crust.

Around the middle of the 20th century, physicists realized that this flux of muons could be used for imaging technology as a way to "X-ray" the Earth, and muon tomography—–or muography–—was born. Over the years, this technology has been used to scan a variety of structures that would be difficult to non-invasively construct an image of otherwise, ranging from underground caves to the Great Pyramid of Giza. Today, it can be used to probe underground in search of rare Earth mineral deposits.

Muon tomography is the practice of detecting the "shadow" of cosmic air showers to construct an image of the object casting that shadow. High density objects attenuate muons more than the surrounding ground, causing a lower flux of muons to pass through mineral deposits. This results in these mineral deposits casting a shadow which our detectors are able to see. Analysis is performed on this data––utilizing multiphysics models and machine learning––to ultimately construct a 3D density map of the ore-body. This 3D image has a spatial resolution on the order of a millimeter.

My Role

Computational Physics Simulations and Detector Design Optimization

In the fall of 2024, my work focused on computationally simulating our detectors to ensure that these detectors work properly and we understand the physics taking place inside of them. I built, ran, analyzed the results of, and validated these simulations. The simulation shoots highly energetic muons into a volume of plastic scintillator. I then analyzed how much of the muon's energy was transformed into scintillation light, what the spatial and temporal distributions of this light yield is, and what the detector's output signal looks like after the light has been transformed into an electrical current. I was also responsible for calculating the theoretical expectation value of these quantities and validating the results of the simulation against these predictions. This simulation then allows us to determine efficient designs of our detectors.

I built these simulations with a package called GEANT4 which is a C++ based package that was developed by CERN to simulate the passage of particles through matter with Monte Carlo methods. The analysis of the results I performed was primarily done with Python, though I also used ROOT which is another package developed by CERN for the purpose of statistical data analysis.

Detector Manufacturing and Laboratory Operations

In the spring of 2025, our lab manufactured the first generation prototypes of our scintillation detectors. In the months leading up to the assembly period, I managed the inventory and day to day operations to ensure that the laboratory was ready for the construction to run as efficiently as possible. Our group held daily meetings and ultimately assembled a successful working prototype in the span of a month which was shipped to Occidental College in Los Angeles for further experimentation.