Development of a non-destructive carbon quantification method in iron by negative muon lifetime measurement
摘要
A novel nondestructive light element analysis method for bulk materials using muon beams was demonstrated. This method is based on the lifetime measurement of muons in a material and performed by measuring muon-decay electrons and identifying elements using the atomic number based on muon lifetimes. Muon irradiation on pure iron and two steel samples with known carbon contents was conducted to prepare a calibration curve for the quantitative analysis. We also performed a muon lifetime measurement for a Japanese sword and successfully determined its carbon content as 0.51 wt% using the calibration curve, without sample destruction.