Muon Interrogration

World-wide detection of nuclear materials is a key mission of LANL in support of the US global threat reduction program. Muons can be used for interrogation since they have large penetration length. We are currently promoting a muon linear accelerator project which will produce a high-intensity well-defined muon beam to interrogate truck trailers, cargo containers or even small ships so that we can thwart the smuggling of nuclear weapons into the United States. In our scheme, the system consists of an electron accelerator to produce muons with high intensity; a muon producing target; a novel muon linear accelerator to accelerate muons to 600 MeV; a germanium detector. The muons are accelerated without any cooling and we carried out a design study of a large acceptance linac.