Die u:cris Detailansicht:
Isobar separation of <sup>93</sup>Zr and <sup>93</sup>Nb at 24 MeV with a new multi-anode ionization chamber
- Autor(en)
- Martin Martschini, Josef Buchriegler, Philippe Collon, Walter Kutschera, Johannes Lachner, Wenting Lu, Alfred Priller, Peter Steier, Robin Golser
- Abstrakt
93Zr with a half-life of 1.6 Ma is produced with high yield in nuclear fission, and thus should be present as a natural or anthropogenic trace isotope in all compartments of the general environment. Sensitive measurements of this isotope would immediately find numerous applications, however, its detection at sufficiently low levels has not yet been achieved. AMS measurements of
93Zr suffer from the interference of the stable isobar
93Nb. At the Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator VERA a new multi-anode ionization chamber was built. It is optimized for isobar separation in the medium mass range and is based on the experience from AMS experiments of
36Cl at our 3-MV tandem accelerator facility. The design provides high flexibility in anode configuration and detector geometry. After validating the excellent energy resolution of the detector with
36S, it was recently used to study iron-nickel and zirconium-niobium-molybdenum isobar separation. To our surprise, the separation of
94Zr (Z = 40) from
94Mo (Z = 42) was found to be much better than that of
58Fe (Z = 26) from
58Ni (Z = 28), despite the significantly larger ΔZ/Z of the latter pair. This clearly contradicts results from SRIM-simulations and suggests that differences in the stopping behavior may unexpectedly favor identification of
93Zr. At 24 MeV particle energy, a
93Nb (Z = 41) suppression factor of 1000 is expected based on a synthetic
93Zr spectrum obtained by interpolation between experimental spectra from the two neighboring stable isotopes
92Zr and
94Zr. Assuming realistic numbers for chemical niobium reduction, a detection level of
93Zr/Zr below 10
-9 seems feasible.
- Organisation(en)
- Isotopenphysik
- Externe Organisation(en)
- Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, University of Notre Dame
- Journal
- Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research. Section B. Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms
- Band
- 361
- Seiten
- 201-206
- Anzahl der Seiten
- 6
- ISSN
- 0168-583X
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nimb.2015.03.061
- Publikationsdatum
- 10-2015
- Peer-reviewed
- Ja
- ÖFOS 2012
- 103014 Kernphysik
- Schlagwörter
- ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
- Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Instrumentation
- Link zum Portal
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/a64f932d-0b7d-4542-9422-eb65c386375d