The actinide beamline at VERA

Autor(en)

Peter Steier, Karin Hain, Urs Klötzli, Johannes Lachner, Alfred Priller, Stephan Winkler, Robin Golser

Abstrakt

Interest in the long-lived radioisotope 236U (T1/2 = 23.4 million years) has significantly increased recently due to the emergence of environmental and earth science applications. Compared to the previous setup at VERA, which was based on oxygen stripping and a time-of-flight detector, we have improved the sensitivity of VERA by more than an order of magnitude by switching to helium stripping and by installing a second 90° magnet in our analyzer beamline. The new setup has been successfully employed for several research projects. Here, we present the characterization of the upgraded spectrometer. We discuss the design of the new beamline and present benchmark measurements, suggesting an instrumental sensitivity limit well below 236U/238U = 10−14. The yield for the 3+ charge state is 19%, of which 90% are recorded in the detector. In environmental samples, one in 4500 sputtered actinide atoms is detected. While this allows tackling natural 236U, also measurements of anthropogenic 236U or other actinides profit from the higher sensitivity. This allows analysis of smaller samples, but also has made the rare anthropogenic isotope 233U accessible.

Organisation(en)

Isotopenphysik, Department für Lithosphärenforschung

Externe Organisation(en)

National Research Foundation

Journal

Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research. Section B. Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms

Band

458

Seiten

82-89

Anzahl der Seiten

8

ISSN

0168-583X

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nimb.2019.07.031

Publikationsdatum

11-2019

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

105127 Geochronologie, 103008 Experimentalphysik

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Instrumentation

Link zum Portal

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/the-actinide-beamline-at-vera(7bd3c6b8-4c0d-4f9e-9f7d-ca26ca607bc8).html