Radioisotope production using lasers:From basic science to applications

The discovery of chirped pulse amplification has led to great improvements in laser technology,enabling energetic laser beams to be compressed to pulse durations of tens of femtoseconds and focused to a few micrometers.Protons with energies of tens of MeV can be accelerated using,for instance,target normal sheath acceleration and focused on secondary targets.Under such conditions,nuclear reactions can occur,with the production of radioisotopes suitable for medical application.The use of high-repetition lasers to produce such isotopes is competitive with conventional methods mostly based on accelerators.In this paper,we study the production of^(67)Cu,^(63)Zn,^(18)F,and^(11)C,which are currently used in positron emission tomography and other applications.At the same time,we study the reactions^(10)B(p,α)^(7)Be and^(70)Zn(p,4n)^(67)Ga to put further constraints on the proton distributions at different angles,as well as the reaction^(11)B(p,α)^(8)Be relevant for energy production.The experiment was performed at the 1 PW laser facility at VegaⅢin Salamanca,Spain.Angular distributions of radioisotopes in the forward(with respect to the laser direction)and backward directions were measured using a high purity germanium detector.Our results are in reasonable agreement with numerical estimates obtained following the approach of Kimura and Bonasera[Nucl.Instrum.Methods Phys.Res.,Sect.A 637,164–170(2011)].

Four α correlations in nuclear fragmentation: a game of resonances

Heavy ion collisions near the Fermi energy produce a‘freezout’region where fragments appear and later decay,emitting mainly neutrons,protons,alpha particles,and gamma rays.These decay products carry information about the decaying nuclei.Fragmentation events may result in high yields of boson particles,especially alpha particles,and may carry important information about the nuclear Bose Einstein condensate(BEC).We study‘in medium’fourαcorrelations and link them to the‘fission’of 16O in two 8Be in the ground state or 12C*(Hoyle state)+α.Using novel techniques for the correlation functions,we confirm the resonance of 16O at 15.2 MeV excitation energy,and the possibility of a lower resonance,close to 14.72 MeV.The latter resonance is the result of allαparticles having 92 keV relative kinetic energies.

Triple α-particle resonances in the decay of hot nuclear systems

The Efimov(Thomas) trimers in excited 12 C nuclei, for which no observation exists yet, are discussed by means of analyzing the experimental data of 70(64)Zn(64 Ni)+ 70(64)Zn(64 Ni) reactions at the beam energy of E/A = 35 MeV/nucleon. In heavy ion collisions, a-particles interact with each other and can form complex systems such as 8 Be and 12 C. For the 3 a-particle systems,multi-resonance processes give rise to excited levels of 12 C. The interaction between any two of the 3 a-particles provides events with one, two or three 8 Be. Their interfering levels are clearly seen in the minimum relative energy distributions. Events with the three a-particle relative energies consistent with the ground state of 8 Be are observed with the decrease of the instrumental error for the reconstructed 7.458 MeV excitation level in 12 C, which was suggested as the Efimov(Thomas) state.