Demultiplexing and Electron-Muon identification in different Micropattern Readout Planes with common U-Net approach

Micropattern Gaseous Detectors, like Micromegas, are used in particle physics to detect charged particles like muons, through the ionization of the gas they contain. Micromegas detectors provide good spatial resolution that allows doing muography, an imaging method using the natural muon flux to study very opaque objects like pyramids, volcanoes or nuclear reactors. One of those detectors, called the multiplexed Micromegas detector, allows to significantly reduce the volume and cost of the electronics. Multiplexed Micromegas need less electronics but produce ambiguous data. Nevertheless, a demultiplexing step is required: a dedicated analysis finds the true position of the particle(s) on the detector. In this work, we propose a new demultiplexing method, with a denoising approach using a U-Net architecture. We show that the same method allows to analyze two types of Micromegas detectors: a one-dimensional (1D) detector with strips and a two-dimensional (2D) detector with pixels in a Time Projection Chamber. We demonstrate that only a few changes must be made to adapt to the 1D and 2D analysis. In the 1D case, data from Khufu’s pyramid muography was re-analyzed, resulting in an image that better matched the pyramid’s simulation. This makes this common method, with a U-Net, easily adaptable for a wide range of other high-granularity particle detectors, even other than gaseous ones, and for different sizes and dimensionalities. Moreover, we show that U-Net’s capabilities also allow distinguishing muon tracks from electron tracks in the 2D detector.