X-ray radiographic technique for measuring density uniformity of silica aerogel

This paper proposes a new X-ray radiographic technique for measuring density uniformity of silica aerogels used as radiator in proximity-focusing ring-imaging Cherenkov detectors. To obtain high performance in a large-area detector, a key characteristic of radiator is the density (i.e. refractive index) uniformity of an individual aerogel monolith. At a refractive index of n  =1.05, our requirement for the refractive index uniformity in the transverse plane direction of an aerogel tile is |δ(n−1)/(n−1)|<4%|δ(n−1)/(n−1)|<4% in a focusing dual layer radiator (with different refractive indices) scheme. We applied the radiographic technique to evaluate the density uniformity of our original aerogels from a trial production and that of Panasonic products (SP-50) as a reference, and to confirm they have sufficient density uniformity within ±1%±1% along the transverse plane direction. The measurement results show that the proposed technique can quantitatively estimate the density uniformity of aerogels.