INPP Seminar - Katharina Domnanich, Michigan State University

About this event

Recent Advances in Aqueous and Solid-Phase Isotope Harvesting at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University is a new user facility for fundamental nuclear science research. The exotic, rare isotope beams for scientific experiments are created by fragmentation of high-power primary beams. In this process, most of the primary beam remains unreacted and will be stopped in a water-cooled beam dump, producing a variety of radioisotopes. Accelerator components also intercept many co-produced secondary fragments. The radionuclides accumulated in the beam-dump water as well as the solid accelerator parts are highly valuable and can be recovered through focused isotope harvesting efforts.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of aqueous and solid-phase isotope harvesting, including a summary of the radionuclides harvested to date and the infrastructure established to support these efforts. For aqueous isotope harvesting, I will focus on recent developments in collecting and chemically purifying Ni radioisotopes (i.e., 56, 57, 59, 63Ni), which are of interest for applications in nuclear astrophysics, nuclear batteries, and ionization sources for radiation detectors.

In solid-phase isotope harvesting, secondary beam fragments are implanted into a solid metal matrix and recovered through radiochemical processing. I will discuss several radionuclides harvested using this approach (i.e., 47Ca, 62Zn, and 189, 197Pt), all of which are of interest for nuclear medicine applications. For each radionuclide, tailored solid-harvesting collector configurations and radiochemical separation procedures were developed to accommodate the respective beam conditions and chemical properties. Recent results from these studies, which were conducted as dedicated harvesting runs, will be presented, together with ongoing efforts to establish solid-phase isotope harvesting as a versatile approach for the recovery of valuable radionuclides produced as by-products of other beam experiments at FRIB.