Excitation functions of nuclear reactions induced by 3He-particles on cobalt

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Abstract

Activation cross-sections for production of 54Mn, 56,57,58,60Co and 60,61Cu radioisotopes in 3He-induced reactions on Co were measured from the respective thresholds up to 26 MeV. The stacked foil irradiation method was used to produce the activation products and the emitted gamma photons were detected by high-resolution gamma-spectroscopy. The obtained new cross-sections are compared with literature data. The possible applications of the available excitation function data are discussed.

Introduction

A project is in progress to provide new and improved cross-section data sets for nuclear reactions induced by light ions (proton, deuteron, 3He- and alpha particles) on isotopes of metals for different practical applications. Special attention is paid to the opportunities available at low energy accelerators. In all cases first a critical evaluation of the relevant literature data is done and then new cross-section measurements are carried out if the available data are scanty or discrepant.

The present paper reports new activation cross-sections for the production of 54Mn, 56,57,58,60Co and 60,61Cu radioisotopes via reactions induced by 3He-particles on Co. Mono-isotopic data could be obtained using cheap targets in the experiments since Cobalt has only one stable isotope. Cross-sections were measured from the respective thresholds up to 26 MeV. Our new data are presented together with literature data published earlier.

Amongst the products mentioned above 54Mn is a frequent choice for labeling and tracing the transport of manganese. 56,57,58,60Co have importance in studying the corrosion and wear of alloys with high cobalt content via the thin layer activation technique [1]. Recently the 60Cu and 61Cu positron emitter radioisotopes have been used for labeling bio-molecules for tumor and hypoxia imaging with positron emission tomograph (PET) [2].

Detailed data sets are available in the literature for reactions induced by protons, deuterons or alpha-particles on Cobalt and leading to the formation of 54Mn, 56,57,58,60Co, 57Ni and 60,61Cu radioisotopes. At the same time, however, only five earlier works have been found for 3He-induced reactions. In 1977 Homa and Murakami [3] investigated the excitation functions of the 3He- and alpha-induced reactions up to 40 MeV in order to determine the optimum irradiation conditions for production of 61Cu for nuclear medicine. The shapes and the absolute values of the reported excitation functions are very unreliable taking into account the reaction Q-values and systematics. In 1983 Michel and Galas [4] performed very detailed measurements for 19 excitation functions up to 130 MeV to study the capabilities of theories of equilibrium and pre-equilibrium nuclear reactions. However, they published only two energy points in the low energy range studied by us. In 1986 excitation functions and thick target recoil ranges were investigated by Jastrzębski et al. [5] in the energy range 50–150 MeV to study the gross features of the interaction of intermediate energy light projectiles with medium mass nuclei. In 1988 the excitation functions and mean projected recoil-ion ranges of the produced radioactive nuclei were measured by Nagame et al. [6] with the same aim up to 65 MeV incident particle energy. In 1996 Kondratyev et al. [7] irradiated Nb and Co targets with 3He particles (Emax=93 MeV) but no data were reported for Co. After investigating the status of literature data it can be concluded that, apart from Nagame et al. [6], the other authors published only few points below 30 MeV bombarding energy.

Section snippets

Experimental

The experimental technique and the data evaluation were identical to that used earlier and as described in our previous publications [8], [9], [10], [11]. Here only those details are presented that are important for further data evaluation.

The stacked foil technique was used. Two sets of 10 μm thick Co foils and 12.5 μm thick Ti beam monitor foils were stacked. The foils were purchased from Goodfellow. The purity of the cobalt foils was 99.9 wt.% and their typical contamination was the

Data evaluation

Basic nuclear data and Q-values of the contributing reactions are collected in Table 1. They were taken from on-line databases of nuclear data centers [12], [13].

The cross-sections were calculated with the well-known activation formula. The number of the incident particles were obtained using the natTi(3He,x)48V and natCu(3He,x)65Zn monitor reactions. Cross-section data for the natTi(3He,x)48V monitor were taken from the recommended data base of IAEA [14], while cross-sections for natCu(3He,x)65

Results and discussions

Table 2 shows the numerical values of the measured new cross-sections obtained for the seven reactions investigated. Graphical presentations of our measured data and third order cubic spline fits to them are shown in Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5, Fig. 6, Fig. 7 in comparison with data published by other authors earlier.

Integral yields for production of 60,61Cu

As it was mentioned above, recently 60,61Cu have been used in PET studies. Cobalt is a mono-isotopic element thus it seems to be advantageous as target material for production of 60,61Cu. Cobalt is cheap, the target preparation is simple, no target recovery is required and the number of disturbing radioisotopes produced simultaneously is smaller than in cases of elements having many stable radioisotopes. Therefore, an estimation of the thick target integral yields of 60Cu and 61Cu production

Conclusions

New activation cross-sections for the production of 54Mn, 56,57,58,60Co and 60,61Cu radioisotopes in 3He-induced reactions on Co were measured from the respective thresholds up to 26 MeV. The observed possible energy shift of our data below 10 MeV could be explained by the large energy absorption in this energy range in the case of using the stacked foil technique. The monitor reactions could not help much in checking the energy scale due to the rather unreliable (and energy independent)

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their thanks to the operators of the Debrecen cyclotron for their accurate work.

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