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 |\delta (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 \pm 1% along the transverse plane direction. The measurement results show that the proposed technique can quantitatively estimate the density uniformity of aerogels. 
Makoto Tabata, Yoshikiyo Hatakeyama, Ichiro Adachi, Takeshi Morita,   Keiko Nishikawa
physics.ins-det hep-ex nucl-ex