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Recently, cosmic ray muons have been considered as a potential high energyradiation probe for monitoring and interrogation of dense, well-shieldedspecial nuclear materials (SNM). Due to their high-penetrative nature, cosmicray muons can easily penetrate shielded nuclear materials with minimalabsorption and with leaving the target objects intact. However, despite thepotential benefits from using cosmic ray muons for SNM monitoring, theirwidespread application has been limited for various reasons, includingrelatively low cosmic ray muon flux at sea level and the difficulty ofmeasuring muon momentum in the field which can increase resolution and reducemeasurement time. In this work, we explore in detail the effect of cosmic raymuon momentum measurement, focusing specifically on SNM monitoringapplications. Three different types of SNMs (HEU, LEU, and Pu) surrounded bylead shielding with five different thicknesses (0, 5, 10, 20, and 30 cm), areanalyzed using Monte Carlo simulation for three momentum measurement resolutionlevels (perfect, limited, and absent). 1000 muons were generated in thesimulation which translates to 4 minutes of measurement time for a standardcargo container. We found that it is possible to identify and separate HEU,LEU, and Pu with high accuracy (> 3 s.d.) when using muon momentum measurement(perfect and limited) even when 30 cm-thick lead shielding was used. Currently,it is not possible to identify or separate the SNMs with 30 cm thick leadshielding without muon momentum knowledge. Our results show that the effect ofmeasuring muon momentum can be significant and can result in reducedmeasurement times by a factor of 3 to 4 and/or improved monitoring and imagingresolution.

The Effect of Cosmic Ray Muon Momentum Measurement for Monitoring Shielded Special Nuclear Materials