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Cosmic ray muon has strong penetrating power and no ionizing radiation hazards, which makes it an ideal probe for detecting special nuclear materials (SNMs). In this article, a high spatial resolution muon tomography system based on Micromegas detectors is proposed to optimize the imaging time and quality. The proposed system includes eight Micromegas detectors based on the thermal bonding technique and a scalable readout system. In addition, a multiplexing method based on position encoding is developed to reduce the number of electronics channels by order of magnitude. The spatial resolution of the proposed system with encoding readout can reach a value of hundred micrometers. Finally, a tomography test is performed, and test results show that this proposed system can image 2-cm objects and distinguish different materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based technique for the on-line identification of highly ionizing particles in a liquid xenon (LXe) detector. The method was developed and successfully exploited to select $\alpha $ particles emitted by 241Am sources submerged in LXe in an overwhelming, mostly beam-related, $\gamma $ -ray background. After revising the main features of xenon and other liquid noble gases as ultra-violet (UV) scintillating media, we describe the algorithm idea and its firmware implementation. We then present the results in terms of efficiency and background suppression for the real-time $\alpha $ -particle tagging and the limits of the MEG trigger configuration. Finally, we show that in MEG II we are going to overcome the main issues and further improve the performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]