The MIMA project. Design, construction and performances of a compact hodoscope for muon radiography applications in the context of archaeology and geophysical prospections

The Muon Imaging for Mining and Archaeology (MIMA) project aims at the development of a non-invasive technique for imaging dense structures or cavities, hidden in the underground or anyway surrounded by huge volumes of matter, based on Muon Absorption Radiography. Given its natural multidisciplinary, the final purpose is the validation of this methodology for applications in different fields, like Archaeology, Geology, mining, Civil Engineering and Civil Protection, in close cooperation with team in these fields. In this paper we report on the design, construction and performance of a compact and lightweight muon telescope designed mainly for archaeological investigation and geophysical prospections in general. The MIMA detector is also used currently as a test instrument to study different hardware solutions to optimize the global performance in these types of applications.