August 08 Issue - Employee Monthly Magazine

Goal: Leverage our science and technology advantage to anticipate, counter, and defeat global threats and meet national priorities, including energy security

Innovative technology helps detect hidden threats

Scanning devices using muon tomography technology detect nuclear weapons or explosives in cargo and vehicle traffic.

The United States may soon gain a decided advantage in the fight against those who would try to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the country, thanks to a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between the Laboratory and Decision Sciences Corporation (DSC). The agreement between the Lab and DSC to commercialize the Lab's innovative muon tomography (MT) technology has produced devices built under DSC's exclusive license that will give the Department of Homeland Security effective tools for passively scanning cargo and vehicle traffic entering the United States.

The technology allows rapid detection of concealed nuclear and explosive materials while eliminating the radiation exposure that occurs with existing scanning technologies. The Laboratory technology will be integrated with DSC's intelligent reasoning software.

"It has been interesting and exciting to work on a project with Decision Sciences," said Christopher Morris of Subatomic Physics, who pioneered the technology.

Morris' method uses muons—naturally occurring high-energy subatomic particles produced by the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth's atmosphere—to identify and locate specific materials based on their atomic density.

MT technology allowed Laboratory researchers to develop detectors and algorithms to trace the muons' path. The resulting data are used to produce detailed, 3-D images of complex objects. Because muons can penetrate lead and other materials used to conceal nuclear or other explosive materials, the reliability of inspections using MT is high. DSC and the Laboratory already have demonstrated the effectiveness of the technology using a smaller scanner called the large muon tracker, Morris said. This work is about to be published in the journal Science and Global Security.

Full-scale production of DSC's Guardian MT equipment is scheduled for the near future, he said.

—Tatjana K. Rosev