A short description of the muon tomography demonstrator at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro near Padua, Italy, is given and the principal achievements owing to the data collected at that experimental facility are presented. In particular, the feasibility studies for several applications based on the muon-tomographic technology, within national and European projects, are discussed. The experimental problems and the procedures used to improve the performance are underlined. In addition, new activities and the related detector optimization are illustrated. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Cosmic-ray muography'.

Cosmic rays are a constant, free source of radiation that can be exploited in various ways to probe heavy and extended objects. Analyzed with proper detection systems, they can produce radiographic as well as tomographic images of bulky materials. Several applications have been proposed, in particular in the domain of security checks, and some are presently fielded for routine use. In this paper, cosmic muon technology is presented, and its possible use in the field of cultural heritage is described. (C) 2018 Academie des sciences. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

In recent decades, muon imaging has found a plethora of applications in many fields. This technique succeeds to infer the density distribution of big inaccessible structures where conventional techniques cannot be used. The requirements of different applications demand specific implementations of image reconstruction algorithms for either multiple scattering or absorption–transmission data analysis, as well as noise-suppression filters and muon momentum estimators. This paper presents successful results of image reconstruction techniques applied to simulated data of some representative applications. In addition to well-known reconstruction methods, a novel approach, the so-called μCT, is proposed for the inspection of spent nuclear fuel canisters. Results obtained based on both μCT and the maximum-likelihood expectation maximization reconstruction algorithms are presented. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Cosmic-ray muography’.

These proceedings introduce a new proposal for a low-emittance muon collider. A low-emittance muon beam is obtained from the process e$^+$e$^-\rightarrow\mu^+\mu^-$ with positrons at the threshold energy of 45 GeV. A first test beam to validate the low-emittance muon production concept will be presented.

A short description of the muon tomography demonstrator at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro near Padua, Italy, is given and the principal achievements owing to the data collected at that experimental facility are presented. In particular, the feasibility studies for several applications based on the muon-tomographic technology, within national and European projects, are discussed. The experimental problems and the procedures used to improve the performance are underlined. In addition, new activities and the related detector optimization are illustrated. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Cosmic-ray muography’.

The LHC program at 13 and 14TeV, after the observation of the candidate SM Higgs boson, will help clarify future subjects of study and shape the needed tools. Any upgrade of the LHC experiments for unprecedented luminosities, such as the High Luminosity-LHC ones, must then maintain the acceptance on electroweak processes that can lead to a detailed study of the properties of the candidate Higgs boson. The acceptance of the key lepton, photon and hadron triggers should be kept such that the overall physics acceptance, in particular for low-mass scale processes, can be the same as the one the experiments featured in 2012. In such a scenario, a new approach to early trigger implementation is needed. One of the major steps will be the inclusion of high-granularity tracking sub-detectors, such as the CMS Silicon Tracker, in taking the early trigger decision. This contribution can be crucial in several tasks, including the confirmation of triggers in other subsystems, and the improvement of the on-line momentum measurement resolution. A muon track-trigger for the CMS experiment at the High Luminosity-LHC is presented. A back-extrapolation of Drift Tubes trigger primitives is proposed to match tracks found at Level 1 with muon candidates. The main figures-of-merit are presented, featuring sharp thresholds and less contamination from lower momentum muons, and an expected rate reduction of a factor of 5–10 at typical thresholds with respect to the muon trigger configuration used in 2012.

We demonstrate that muon tomography can be used to precisely measure the properties of various materials. The materials which have been considered have been extracted from an experimental blast furnace, including carbon (coke) and iron oxides, for which measurements of the linear scattering density relative to the mass density have been performed with an absolute precision of 10%. We report the procedures that are used in order to obtain such precision, and a discussion is presented to address the expected performance of the technique when applied to heavier materials. The results we obtain do not depend on the specific type of material considered and therefore they can be extended to any application.

The production cross sections of the B^{+}, B^{0}, and B_{s}^{0} mesons, and of their charge conjugates, are measured via exclusive hadronic decays in p+Pb collisions at the center-of-mass energy sqrt[s_{NN}]=5.02 TeV with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC. The data set used for this analysis corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 34.6 nb^{-1}. The production cross sections are measured in the transverse momentum range between 10 and 60 GeV/c. No significant modification is observed compared to proton-proton perturbative QCD calculations scaled by the number of incoherent nucleon-nucleon collisions. These results provide a baseline for the study of in-medium b quark energy loss in Pb+Pb collisions.

Muon tomography was recently proposed as a tool to inspect large volumes with the purpose of recognizing high density materials immersed in lower density matrices. The MU-STEEL European project (RFCS-CT-2010-000033) studied the application of such a technique to detect radioactive source shielding in truck containers filled with scrap metals entering steel mill foundries. A description of the muon tomography technique, of the MU-STEEL project and of the obtained results will be presented.

Results are reported from a search for the effects of contact interactions using events with a high-mass, oppositely charged muon pair. The events are collected in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV using the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.3 inverse femtobarns. The observed dimuon mass spectrum is consistent with that expected from the standard model. The data are interpreted in the context of a quark- and muon-compositeness model with a left-handed isoscalar current and an energy scale parameter Lambda. The 95% confidence level lower limit on Lambda is 9.5 TeV under the assumption of destructive interference between the standard model and contact-interaction amplitudes. For constructive interference, the limit is 13.1 TeV. These limits are comparable to the most stringent ones reported to date.

Muon tomography has been recently proposed by a Los Alamos research group [1]. Some proponents of this abstract built and operated the first large volume prototype of muon tomography [2] and based on the results obtained participated to a request for European funding, that was granted in the Mu-Steel project [3]. The project started in July 2010 and finished at the end of 2012. The final goal of the project was the design of an inspection portal able to detect, using the cosmic rays, shielded radioactive sources hidden in scrap metal containers. Indeed in the last years it happened that such radioactive sources could pass undetected the entrance controls and, once melted, caused enormous damages to the steel mills, contaminating all the production line. The project studied and built a prototype for the muon detectors to be used in the portal, designed the structure and the configuration of the inspection portal and developed the needed tomographic reconstruction software. The results of the project will be presented and discussed.

A measurement of the tt¯ production cross section in pp collisions at s=7TeV is presented. The results are based on data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.3 fb−1 collected by the CMS detector at the LHC. Selected events are required to have one isolated, high transverse momentum electron or muon, large missing transverse energy, and hadronic jets, at least one of which must be consistent with having originated from a b quark. The measured cross section is 158.1±2.1(stat.)±10.2(syst.)±3.5(lum.)pb, in agreement with standard model predictions.