Special nuclear target– and thin film technology at the University of Munich

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Abstract

A review of recent activities of the Target Laboratory of the University of Munich is given. These include the preparation of actinide targets, the manufacture and handling of a thick 180Ta powder target, and the coating of narrow ceramic tubes with refractory materials like Nb.

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Actinide targets

After a shutdown period of nearly 10 yr, radioactive target production has been resumed in a new hot-lab facility, which is equipped with up-to-date thin film fabrication apparatus and meets all the current safety requirements for handling of radioactive material [1].

The general aspects of target production in the new facility are outlined in Ref. [2]. Briefly, a series of three gloveboxes and a hot cell, which are interconnected by lock chambers, are installed in the laboratory. They form a

Thick 180Ta2O5 target for photon excitation experiments

180Ta is one of the rarest isotopes in the periodic table. Its natural abundance being 0.012%, isotopic material with an enrichment of 5.45% is sold by ORNL at a price of $15174/mg. For photon excitation investigations [4], a thick 180Ta2O5 powder target had to be provided. Since conventional preparation methods like tablet pressing or centrifugation are affected with appreciable material losses, they could not be applied in this special case. Therefore, the target construction shown in Fig. 2

Coating of narrow ceramic tubes with niobium

For the development of a laser ion source for the REX ISOLDE project at CERN [5], the internal surface of ceramic tubes of 3 mm diameter and 60 mm length had to be coated with a Nb film of about 50 μg cm−2 thickness. This was performed with the setup shown in Fig. 3, which was installed in a cryopumped vacuum chamber. A Nb wire of 0.5 mm diameter was fed through the tube and brought to a temperature sufficient to cause sublimation by resistance heating. A load at the lower end of the wire

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  • H.J. Maier et al.

    Nucl. Instr. and Meth. B

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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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