Simulations of Modular Multiwire Proportional Chambers for Cosmic Ray Muon Detection

The Student Physics Society (SPS) at Kennesaw State University is building a series of multi-wire proportional chambers as a tool to detect cosmic ray muons with the goal of doing muography on large structures. A simulation of the chamber’s interactions with muons and radioactive sources is being created in Geant4. The simulation is being used as both method of confirming viability of the overall chamber design and with the intention of optimizing the detector capacity for large structure muography through machine learning. We are comparing both the simulated and actual signals created by a radioactive source placed within the chamber as well as those created by cosmic ray muons. The Geant4 framework allows the modeling of the interactions of the muons with the gas mixture inside the chamber, the corresponding electron cascade, and the resulting current incident on internal wires. The first step in creating the simulation is describing the chamber geometry in SolidWorks and importing that into Geant4’s framework. Once the geometry is imported the simulated environment is set up and virtual experiments are run.