Seeing through Matter: Optimizing Cosmic-Ray Muon Tomography for Faster and Reliable Cargo Screening

Overview

Cargo screening is important for checking shipping containers for illegal or dangerous materials. X-rays are often used, but they are harmful and expensive. A newer method, called Muon Tomography, uses natural and safe particles called muons to scan containers. However, this method can be slow, may miss very small objects, and still needs experts to review the results. In my project, I worked to make this method faster and more reliable for finding dangerous materials. I used a C++ toolkit called Geant4 to simulate this scanning method on a downscaled container. I found it takes at minimum about 25 seconds to detect an anomaly and that the smallest detectable volume of Uranium was 25 cm³. I also created an AI model to help automate the detection of nuclear materials and built a muon detector to test my results in real life.

Awards (2)

• Bronze Medal
• Selected for CWSF 2026

Competition history

• CWSF 2026 Curiosity & Ingenuity

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