Novel, Portable and Low-cost Cosmic Ray Muon Telescope

Cosmic ray (CR) particles (mainly high energy proton particles) of galactic and solar origins are continually bombarding the earth. These CR particles produce extensive CR showers starting around 15 km altitude. The dominate CR particles to reach the earth surface being muons (about 80%). Many useful applications of CR muons include muon tomography and atmospheric weather study. The Nuclear Physics Group (NPG) at Georgia State University (GSU) has been developing low-cost and portable muon detectors with interests of worldwide installation for measuring CR muon flux variations to advance the technology of monitoring dynamical changes of the earth/space weather.  The muon telescope detector consists of three layers of plastic scintillation mounted on an aluminum extrusion frame. Collected scintillation light is sent to a multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC). Data acquisition is performed with a custom-made Raspberry Pi Hat. A detector prototype was tested in June of 2018 behind beam shielding blocks at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility with a 120 GeV/c proton beam.  My work mainly entails building components, soldering circuit boards, assembly, programming readout electronics and data analysis. This talk will highlight the detector's design features and present my data analyses results.