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In the last decade, many groups around the world have been exploring different ways to probe transport containers which may contain illicit Special Nuclear Materials such as uranium. The muon tomography technique has been proposed as a cost effective system with an acceptable accuracy. A group of Canadian institutions (see above), funded by Defence Research and Development Canada, is testing different technologies to track the cosmic muons. One candidate is the single wire Drift Chamber. With the capability of a 2D impact position measurement, two detectors will be placed above and two below the object to be probed. In order to achieve a good 3D image quality of the cargo content, a good angular resolution is required. The simulation showed that 1mrad was required implying the spatial resolution of the trackers must be in the range of 1 to 2 mm for 1 m separation. A tracking system using three prototypes has been built and tested. The spatial resolution obtained is 1.7 mm perpendicular to the wire and 3 mm along the wire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of nuclear non-proliferation muon interactions with materials are of great interest. This paper describes an experiment conducted at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) in Switzerland where a muon beam is stopped in a uranium target.The muons produce characteristic muonic X rays. Muons will penetrate shielding easily and the produced characteristic X rays can be used for positive isotope identification. Furthermore, the X rays for uranium isotopes lie in the energy range of 6-7 MeV, which allows them to have an almost optimal mean free path in heavy shielding such as lead or steel. A measurement was conducted at PSI to prove the feasibility of detecting muonic X rays from a large sample of depleted uranium (several kilograms) with a germanium detector. In this paper, the experimental setup and analysis of the measurement itself is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. Knowledge of the transition rate between the ortho- and para-molecular states of muonic molecular hydrogen is critical for the extraction of the induced pseudoscalar coupling of the proton, g[sub p], from muon capture experiments in hydrogen. A measurement of this rate has recently been completed at TRIUMF, and a status report on the experiment is presented here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]