Berkeley Lab-Led Project Secures Funding to Develop a Transportable Muon Imager

Insider Brief

• Berkeley Lab and Ideon Technologies received ARPA-E funding for a three-year project to develop an active muon imaging system designed to accelerate the discovery and characterization of critical mineral deposits.
• The project will use compact laser-plasma accelerators to generate directed muon beams potentially thousands of times more intense than naturally occurring cosmic-ray muons, reducing some subsurface imaging times from months to hours.
• Researchers aim to demonstrate a two-stage, 12-GeV electron accelerator as a step toward 30-GeV to 100-GeV systems capable of producing muons that can penetrate roughly 50 to 150 meters of rock.

PRESS RELEASE — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in partnership with Ideon Technologies, has received funding from the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) through the Reliable Ore Characterization with Keystone Sensing (ROCKS) initiative. The three-year project aims to secure domestic supplies of critical minerals—materials essential to energy, industry, and national security—by imaging deep beneath the Earth’s surface with precision that conventional sensing techniques cannot match.