MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4409823554 · doi:10.1080/00223131.2025.2497864

Strengths and limitations of cosmic-ray muon tomography for nuclear disarmament verification application

2025· article· en· W4409823554 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Nuclear Science and Technology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPhysics and Astronomy
TopicParticle Detector Development and Performance
Canadian institutionsCanadian Nuclear Laboratories
FundersAtomic Energy of Canada Limited
KeywordsCosmic rayNuclear physicsDisarmamentNuclear engineeringMuonPhysicsRadiochemistryChemistryEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Nuclear disarmament verification (NDV), which is the use of technologies and procedures to verify nuclear weapons reductions without the transfer of sensitive information, is currently a major worldwide field of work. The work presented here demonstrates experimentally the usefulness of muon tomography for the verification of a mock-up of a nuclear warhead. Experimental results are extended further with Monte Carlo simulations to predict results and draw conclusions in the case of enclosures containing a nuclear weapon core. Muon tomography has proven to be effective in the detection of high-density and high-atomic-number materials, even when they are surrounded by heavy shielding such as lead. Although the technique can determine the presence of a high-density and high-Z core, our muon tomography system and analysis algorithm have limited angular resolution and therefore do not provide information on the nature of the material. To overcome this limitation and to mitigate risks associated with swapping a nuclear weapon core with tungsten, gamma rays and neutron techniques are proposed. These are shown to be complementary techniques for NDV applications.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.683
Threshold uncertainty score0.142

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.255
Teacher spread0.245 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it