Experimental Demonstration of Multiple Monoenergetic Gamma Radiography for Effective Atomic Number Identification in Cargo Inspection

Abstract

The smuggling of special nuclear materials (SNM) through international borders could enable nuclear terrorism and constitutes a significant threat to global security. This paper presents the experimental demonstration of a novel radiographic technique for inferring the density and type of material present in commercial cargo containers, as a means of detecting such threats. Unlike traditional techniques which use sources of bremsstrahlung photons with a continuous distribution of energies, this technique utilizes monoenergetic photons from nuclear reactions, specifically the 4.4 and 15.1 MeV photons from the $^{11}$B(d,n$\gamma$)$^{12}$C reaction. By exploiting the $Z$-dependence of photon interaction cross sections at these two specific energies it is possible to simultaneously determine the areal density and the effective atomic number as a function of location for a 2D projection of the scanned object. The additional information gleaned from using and detecting photons of specific energies for radiography substantially increases resolving power between different materials. This paper presents results from the imaging of mock cargo materials ranging from $Z\approx5\text{-}92$, demonstrating accurate reconstruction of the effective atomic number and areal density of the materials over the full range. In particular, the system is capable of distinguishing pure materials with $Z\gtrsim70$, such as lead and uranium --- a critical requirement of a system designed to detect SNM. This methodology could be used to distinguish most benign materials from SNM, such as uranium and plutonium, reducing false positives to an acceptable rate.