Search results for "actinide"
showing 10 items of 111 documents
Efficiency of dihydroxamic and trihydroxamic siderochelates to extract uranium and plutonium from contaminated soils
2021
International audience; Actinide-based mineral phases occurring in contaminated soils can be solubilized by organic chelators excreted by plants, such as citrate. Herein, the efficiency of citrate towards U and Pu extraction is compared to that of siderophores, whose primary function is the acquisition of iron(III) as an essential nutrient and growth factor for many soil microorganisms. To that end, we selected desferrioxamine B (DFB) as an emblematic bacterial trishydroxamic siderophore and a synthetic analog, abbreviated (LCy,Pr)H2, of the tetradentate rhodotorulic acid (RA) produced by yeasts. Firstly, the uranyl speciation with both ligands was assessed in the pH range 2–11 by potentiom…
The New Generation of Resonant Laser Ionization Mass Spectrometers: Becoming Competitive for Selective Atomic Ultra-Trace Determination?
2002
A critical assessment of the present status of resonant laser ionization mass spectrometry (RIMS) as a specialized analytical technique for the field of atomic ultra-trace determination is attempted and a comparison with established mass spectrometric methods is made. Within the last years RIMS on atomic species has rapidly developed towards becoming a versatile experimental technique, in particular addressing those applications that require high selectivity in respect of isobaric or isotopic interferences. This progress is mainly based on the advent of easy-to-handle tunable solid-state laser systems for both pulsed and continuous operation, which are used in combination with modern compac…
2018
We show that the measured intrinsic octupole moments of $^{220}\mathrm{Rn}$, $^{224}\mathrm{Ra}$, and $^{226}\mathrm{Ra}$ constrain the intrinsic Schiff moments of $^{225}\mathrm{Ra}$, $^{221}\mathrm{Rn}$, $^{223}\mathrm{Rn}$, $^{223}\mathrm{Fr}$, $^{225}\mathrm{Ra}$, and $^{229}\mathrm{Pa}$. The result is a dramatically reduced uncertainty in intrinsic Schiff moments. Direct measurements of octupole moments in odd nuclei will reduce the uncertainty even more. The only significant source of nuclear-physics error in the laboratory Schiff moments will then be the intrinsic matrix elements of the time-reversal noninvariant interaction produced by $CP$-violating fundamental physics. Those matri…
Historical Reminiscences: The Pioneering Years of Superheavy Element Research
2013
This chapter deals with the pioneering years of superheavy element research, from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. The prediction that superheavy nuclides could form an island around element 114 with half-lives long enough to have survived in Nature since nucleosynthesis led to intensive searches—not unlike “gold fever”—for such relic nuclei in all sorts of natural environments. Positive claims were raised from time to time but could not stand up under further scrutiny. Numerous attempts to synthesize superheavy nuclei by large leaps from the mainland of elemental stability to the island of superheavy elements went without success as well. The discovery of three more transactinide elements, …
Rational design and modelling of f-block molecular nanomagnets
2016
Los imanes monomoleculares o moléculas imán, por sus siglas en inglés SMMs, han suscitado una gran atención en los últimos años debido a sus extraordinarias propiedades físicas. Los cristales de este tipo de moléculas se caracterizan por presentar relajación lenta de la magnetización a baja temperatura, así como curvas de histeresis magnética. Estas moléculas se encuentran entre las entidades con comportamiento magnético más complejas, mostrando fenómenos cuánticos tales como efecto túnel en la magnetización, coherencia cuántica o interferencia cuántica. Por esto, se han postulado como candidatos prometedores para el diseño de bits cuánticos (qubits) de espín en computación cuántica. La pri…
Identification of hexanuclear Actinide(IV) carboxylates with Thorium, Uranium and Neptunium by EXAFS spectroscopy
2012
International audience; Hydrated actinide(IV) ions undergo hydrolysis and further polymerization and precipitation with increasing pH. The resulting amorphous and partly crystalline oxydydroxides AnO(n)(OH)(4-2n)center dot xH(2)O can usually be observed as colloids above the An(IV) solubility limit. The aging process of such colloids results in crystalline AnO(2). The presence of carboxylates in the solution prevents the occurrence of such colloids by formation of polynuclear complexes through a competing reaction between hydrolysis and ligation. The majority of recently described carboxylates reveals a hexanuclear core of [An(6)(mu(3)-O)(4)(mu(3)-OH)(4)](12+) terminated by 12 carboxylate l…
Shell effects in damped collisions of Sr-88 with Yb-176 at the Coulomb barrier energy
2014
[Introduction] This work is a study of the influence of shell effects on the formation of binary fragments in damped collision. We have investigated binary reaction channels of the composite system with Z = 108 produced in the reaction 88 Sr + 176 Yb at an energy slightly above the Bass barrier ( E c.m. /E Bass = 1 . 03). Reaction products were detected by using the two-arm time-of-flight spectrometer CORSET at the K130 cyclotron of the Department of Physics, University of Jyv ̈ askyl ̈ a. The mass-energy distribution of primary binary fragments has been measured. For targetlike fragments heavier than 190 u, which correspond to a mass transfer as large as twenty nucleons or more, an enhance…
Actinide and lanthanide thin-layer developments using a drop-on-demand printing system
2023
Actinide and lanthanide thin layers with specific requirements regarding thickness, homogeneity, chemical purity, mechanical stability, and backing properties are applied in a multitude of physics and chemistry experiments. A novel target preparation method, the so-called “Drop-on-Demand” (DoD) technique, based on a commercial nanoliter (nL) dispenser is applied since a few years in the Nuclear Chemistry unit at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. The wetting behaviour of the nL droplets on the substrate’s surface is a key parameter determining the spatial distribution of the deposited material after evaporation. By switching from aqueous to organic solvents as well as by substrate surface…
Uptake of actinides by calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H) phases
2018
Abstract The sorption of actinides (Th, U – Am) was studied in dependence of the solid-to-liquid (S/L) ratio (0.5–20.0 g/L) and the calcium-to-silicon (C:S) ratio. The C:S ratio was varied between 1.80 and 0.70 to simulate the changing composition of the C-S-H phases during cement degradation from high to low C:S ratios. The decrease of the calcium content in the C-S-H phases by time is accompanied by a decrease in pH in the corresponding suspensions from 12.6 to 10.2. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) of the C-S-H phases showed an increasing depletion of Ca on the surface with increasing C:S ratio in comparison to the composition of the solid phase as a whole. The sorption experiments…
Separation of lanthanides and actinides using magnetic silica particles bearing covalently attached tetra-CMPO-calix[4]arenes
2004
Calix[4]arene tetraethers in the cone conformation bearing four –NH–CO–CH2–P(O)Ph2 (= CMPO) residues on their wide rim and one, two or four ω-amino alkyl residues of various lengths at the narrow rim were synthesized. Reaction with dichlorotriazinyl (DCT) functionalized magnetic particles led to complete coverage of the available surface by covalently linked CMPO-calix[4]arenes in all cases. Magnetically assisted removal of Eu(III) and Am(III) from acidic solutions was distinctly more efficient with these particles in comparison to analogous particles bearing the same amount of analogous single-chain CMPO-functions. The best result, an increase of the extraction efficiency by a factor of 14…