Technology Transfer Department

Application sectors

Problem to solve

The traditional procedure for alpha emitting radionuclide analysis has two main limitations. First: the uncertainty in assigning spectral bands to the correct radioisotope. To reduce this ambiguity, radionuclides are chemically separated before measurement, analyzing several samples derived from the original. This process is time- and material-consuming and may introduce contamination from residual traces of other isotopes. Second: activity calculation relies on a single spectral band, even though the same isotope produces several. This approach leads to errors: high-energy bands may be distorted by coincidences between alpha particles and conversion electrons, which combine and shift counts to higher energies, wrongly attributing them to different bands. Moreover, with limited resolution spectrometers (>20 keV), intense bands often overlap or absorb weaker ones, causing a systematic overestimation of the isotope's calculated activity.

Description

Alpha-decaying isotopes emit alpha particles with discrete energies. Because the measured energy peak distributions may overlap due to the limited attainable energy resolution of Silicon detectors, an approach is proposed to overcome the common problem of ambiguity in radioisotopes identification and to provide a more accurate and sensitive determination of their activity.

Research group involved