Radiation in Art and Cultural Heritage

Art objects like paintings or sculptures represent a considerable part of our history. Besides the works of art that survived, further remnants are considered of major importance to understand the development of mankind, like archaeological artefacts. All these objects art and cultural heritage give insight into the past and are essential archives to understand our history. The objects themselves are conserved and studied by specialists, based on classical knowledge and experience of art historians or archaeologists, but more and more supported by natural sciences and technical investigation methods. The application of ionising radiation in art history, archaeology or palaeontology is less known, but represents an important branch of the methods when it comes to the analysis of material composition or imaging techniques of historically valuable objects. Nuclear methods and X-ray technologies are the most important applications because of their quasi non-destructive features and their macroscopic to microscopic range of the interactions with the object. Depending on the questions to be answered, one can imagine to introduce various radiations from nuclear reactors, accelerators, spallation sources or X-ray generators. In this paper, a few selected examples are presented to give brief insight into the use of reactor neutrons and X-rays in art and cultural heritage and the results that can be obtained.