Laser-driven muon production: for materials inspection and imaging

Traditionally muon radiography utilizes cosmic ray muons as a radiation source, however this results in very large and unpredictable acquisition times due to low muon flux and the inability to control their production.

A solution for this low flux problem is to produce muons using PW scale lasers, inducing the Bethe-Heitler muon pair production process from laser wakefield electron beams incident on high-Z targets. This thesis outlines and details laser-driven muon production through simulation results using FLUKA and experimental results acquired at Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP). Using FLUKA, muon pair production from high-Z targets is characterised in terms of target thickness and primary electron beam parameters, along with the design of a muon beamline focused on noise attenuation and subsequent application of this beamline to 10PW laser facility electron beam parameters.