Speaker
Description
Computational modeling of environments with neutron fluxes, such as stellar nucleosynthesis and validations in nuclear applications, requires high fidelity nuclear data to be reliable. So far, such highly accurate data has been acquired primarily for stable nuclei. As a result, higher quality experimental nuclear data is needed for other nuclei, which includes nearly all radionuclides, because theoretical data is currently used to predict their nuclear properties and these data can vary significantly from their true values [1]. Directly measuring nuclear reactions on solid targets provides the highest quality experimental data [2]. These kinds of measurements have been performed at the Los Alamos Neutron Science CEnter (LANSCE) using a variety of radioactive targets produced in house utilizing recently expanded radioactive target fabrication capabilities and leveraging production capabilities for production of radioactive isotopes at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Recently, a microliter-sized liquid source containing tens of mCi of $^{88}$Zr and an $^{26}$Al molecular plated target were fabricated and measured utilizing Device for Indirect Neutron Capture Experiments on Radionuclides (DICER) and Low Energy NZ (LENZ) instruments, respectively [3-5]. This talk will cover the more recent efforts at LANL to manufacture and characterize solid radioactive targets to enable the acquisition of high-quality nuclear reaction data.
This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. 89233218CNA000001 at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
[1] J. A. Shusterman et al., Nature, 565, 328–330 (2019).
[2] P. Schillebeeckx et al., Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res. A, 613, 378-385 (2010).
[3] A. Stamatopoulos et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 134, 112702 (2025).
[4] A. Stamatopoulos et al., Phys. Rev. C, 111, 034613 (2025).
[5] S. D. Essenmacher et al., Sci. Rep. (in press).
LA-UR-26-23426