Experimental Demonstration of Soft-Tissue Muon Scattering Tomography
Abstract
Muons have fascinated physicists since their discovery in cosmic rays almost a century ago. Their large mass and relatively long lifetime allow relativistic muons to traverse large amounts of matter, a property that has been exploited to probe otherwise inaccessible structures, from volcanoes and archaeological monuments to shielded nuclear materials. Here, we experimentally demonstrate for the first time that muon scattering tomography can be extended to biological soft tissue. We image an anthropomorphic thorax phantom using a 2 GeV/c muon beam at the CERN Proton Synchrotron and reconstruct its three-dimensional scattering density from the measured deflections of individual muons. Despite the weak scattering produced by tissue-equivalent materials, the reconstructed density agrees with the expectation from simulation at the percent level. Our results extend muon imaging into a previously unexplored regime and open the possibility of using muons as a complementary probe for medical imaging.
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BibTeX
@misc{banerjee2026experimental,
title = {{Experimental Demonstration of Soft-Tissue Muon Scattering Tomography}},
author = {Dipanwita Banerjee and Benjamin Banto Oberhauser and Paolo Crivelli and Laura Molina Bueno},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.16647},
eprint = {2610.16647},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16647},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Experimental Demonstration of Soft-Tissue Muon Scattering Tomography
AU - Dipanwita Banerjee
AU - Benjamin Banto Oberhauser
AU - Paolo Crivelli
AU - Laura Molina Bueno
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/12
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.16647
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16647
AB - Muons have fascinated physicists since their discovery in cosmic rays almost a century ago. Their large mass and relatively long lifetime allow relativistic muons to traverse large amounts of matter, a property that has been exploited to probe otherwise inaccessible structures, from volcanoes and archaeological monuments to shielded nuclear materials. Here, we experimentally demonstrate for the first time that muon scattering tomography can be extended to biological soft tissue. We image an anthropomorphic thorax phantom using a 2 GeV/c muon beam at the CERN Proton Synchrotron and reconstruct its three-dimensional scattering density from the measured deflections of individual muons. Despite the weak scattering produced by tissue-equivalent materials, the reconstructed density agrees with the expectation from simulation at the percent level. Our results extend muon imaging into a previously unexplored regime and open the possibility of using muons as a complementary probe for medical imaging.
ER -