Our Mission

Editor illustration

To search for hidden chambers in Kukulcan’s pyramid at the world heritage site in Chichen Itza, Mexico using cosmic ray muons.

We’re building a detector to track the path of cosmic ray muons using technology common to High Energy Physics experiments. By measuring the rate of muons that traverse the pyramid, we can estimate how much material the muons passed through in all directions. Comparing that to the known material, we can search for any undiscovered chambers buried inside the pyramid. This is much like an x-ray, however our detector is small compared to the size of the pyramid and muons are a million times more energetic than the x-ray photons.

NAUM and EgyptPyramid collaborations joined efforts to develop a readout system based on the detector techniques developed by the Mu2e and D0 Experiments at Fermilab. In particular, Professor E. Craig Dukes and students from the University of Virginia have contributed to the NAUM project.

Our Collaborators

Edmundo Garcia-Solis, Austin Harton (Chicago State University)
Joseph Sagerer (Dominican University)
Mark Adams (UIC/Fermilab-QuarkNet)
Sten Hansen (Fermilab)
Eduardo Pérez de Heredia (Tecnologia Zero)
Jose Osorio, Marco Antonio Santos Ramirez (Instituto Nacional de Arqueologia e Historia - INAH)
Arturo Menchaca Rocha, Azucena Cervantes, Hesiquio Vargas (Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mexico - UNAM)
Ben Cohen, E. Craig Dukes, Eric Fernandez, Luke Watson (University of Virginia)

Logos