The actinide beamline at VERA

Author(s)

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

Abstract

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(s)

Isotope Physics, Department of Lithospheric Research

External organisation(s)

National Research Foundation

Journal

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

Volume

458

Pages

82-89

No. of pages

8

ISSN

0168-583X

DOI

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

Publication date

11-2019

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

105127 Geochronology, 103008 Experimental physics

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Instrumentation

Portal url

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