Archive for the ‘X-ray’ tag
X-ray squared
We’ve posted a couple of times before about revolutions in scanning and probing technology allowing scientists to study and detect intricate molecular detail (e.g lab-on-a-chip, nanoscale MRI, and imaging mass spectrometry).
But what if you’re trying to study something much larger? Say a Mayan temple? Or a cave? Good luck running a imaging mass spec on that!
Seismic imaging techniques might give you some clues, but they run the risk of damaging what you’re trying to study and are generally not precise enough to necessarily be able to detect hidden rooms. What you want is to be able to X-ray the temple – without the hassle of an X-ray. Well, researchers at the University of Texas in Austin are using just such a method: muons.
For those of you who aren’t particle physicists, muons are negatively charged subatomic particles that are about 200 times larger than electrons and are very good at penetrating substances, a property which makes muon tomography possible. Much as X-rays can be used to image the insides of a person because of their ability to penetrate the skin, muons can be used to image Mayan pyramids because of their ability to penetrate the rock which makes up the walls of the pyramid. And, instead of being absorbed by bone like X-rays are, muons are deflected, and the amount of deflection is dependent on the density of the substance that they encounter.
So, the method sounds great on paper, but where do you get these muons? Does one need to carry a giant muon machine analogous to the large X-ray devices that you may find at the doctor’s or dentist’s? Well, that would be one approach, except the energy necessary to create muons is only achieved inside a high energy particle accelerator. Unless someone is intending to move the Large Hadron Collider to Central America, that approach hardly seems viable.
Luckily, there is a readily accessible source of muons that is far more powerful than CERN’s famed Large Hadron Collider: the universe.
Every moment, thanks to cosmic rays, we are being bombarded by muons, and since they pretty much come from everywhere in the cosmo’s, that gives a decent “baseline” from which to measure muon deflection.
All that’s needed is to plant a couple muon detectors (pictured on the left) in strategic locations, some detection techniques borrowed from particle physics, and sophisticated computer-aided tomography technology, the self-dubbed UT Maya Muon group is able to image at meter-resolution at a radius of almost 100 meters from the detector – enabling the researchers to create a 3D model of the pyramid.
And, I bet if you listen carefully, you’ll hear someone say “my muon generator is bigger than your muon generator!”
(Image Credit – Mayan temple) (Image Credit – Muon detector)
