Search results for "nuclide"
showing 10 items of 397 documents
Revealing the pace of river landscape evolution during the Quaternary: recent developments in numerical dating methods
2016
During the last twenty years, several technical developments have considerably intensified the use of numerical dating methods for the Quaternary. The study of fluvial archives has greatly benefited from these enhancements, opening new dating horizons for a range of archives at distinct time scales and thereby providing new insights into previously unanswered questions. In this contribution, we separately present the state of the art of five numerical dating methods that are frequently used in the fluvial context: radiocarbon, Luminescence, Electron Spin Resonance (ESR), 230Th/U and terrestrial cosmogenic nuclides (TCN) dating. We focus on the major recent developments for each technique th…
68Ge/68Ga Generators: Past, Present, and Future
2012
In 1964, first (68)Ge/(68)Ga radionuclide generators were described. Although the generator design was by far not adequate to our today's level of chemical, radiopharmaceutical and medical expectations, it perfectly met the needs of molecular imaging of this period. (68)Ga-EDTA as directly eluted from the generators entered the field of functional diagnosis, in particular for brain imaging. A new type of generators became commercially available in the first years of the 21st century. Generator eluates based on hydrochloric acid provided "cationic" (68)Ga instead of "inert" (68)Ga-complexes and opened new pathways of Me(III) based radiopharmaceutical chemistry. The impressive success of util…
Environmental Gamma Radiation Measurements on the Island of Pantelleria
1992
The population exposure to those living on the island of Pantelleria, Italy, was estimated by measuring the natural gamma background. Gamma spectra of natural rocks and measurements of absorbed dose in air were taken. A correlation was found between the mean gamma exposure rate and the mean values of natural radionuclide concentrations in the investigated rocks.
Constraints on the Cretaceous thermal event in the Transantarctic Mountains from alteration processes in Ferrar flood basalts
1999
Abstract K–Ar and 40 Ar/ 39 Ar incremental-heating analyses on apophyllite formed during hydrothermal alteration of volcanic rocks from the Ferrar Supergroup in North Victoria Land, Antarctica, provide strong evidence for hydrothermal events during mid-Cretaceous time. A last event has been dated at 96.7±0.6 Ma. Variable older ages between 112 and 125 Ma are interpreted as mixed ages of hydrothermal events or may be caused by disturbances of the Ar–Ar system. The Rb–Sr isotope system of the apophyllites is not applicable to dating because a large portion of the Sr is radiogenic and because of Rb-mobility in the crystal structure. Secondary mineralogy suggests a temperature for alteration be…
Direct dating of gold by radiogenic helium: Testing the method on gold from Diamantina, Minas Gerais, Brazil
2013
New analytical developments have made radiogenic helium ( 4 He) applicable to archeological gold artifacts for age determinations. Here we report the application of the U/Th– 4 He method to the direct dating of gold from the historically important gold deposit in Diamantina, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The U/Th– 4 He age of 515 ± 55 Ma for the Diamantina gold is corroborated by a new U/Pb age of 524 ± 16 Ma for rutile recovered from auriferous pockets. These ages tie the Diamantina gold mineralization to the Brasiliano orogenic event, in the context of the Gondwana amalgamation. Our results indicate that U/Th– 4 He dating of gold is possible, opening new perspectives for the dating of gold deposi…
Geo-neutrino results with Borexino
2015
International audience; Borexino is a liquid scintillator detector primary designed to observe solar neutrinos. Due to its low background level as well as its position in a nuclear free country, Italy, Borexino is also sensitive to geo-neutrinos. Borexino is leading this interdisciplinary field of neutrino geoscience by studying electron antineutrinos which are emitted from the decay of radioactive isotopes present in the crust and the mantle of the Earth. With 2056 days of data taken between December 2007 and March 2015, Borexino observed 77 antineutrino candidates. If we assume a chondritic Th/U mass ratio of 3.9, the number of geo-neutrino events is found to be 23.7(+6.5) (-5.7)(stat) (+…
SOX: search for short baseline neutrino oscillations with Borexino
2015
International audience; The Borexino detector has convincingly shown its outstanding performances in the low energy regime through its accomplishments in the observation and study of the solar and geo neutrinos. It is then an ideal tool to perform a state of the art source-based experiment for testing the longstanding hypothesis of a fourth sterile neutrino with ~ eV(2) mass, as suggested by several anomalies accumulated over the past three decades in source, reactor, and accelerator-based experiments. The SOX project aims at successively deploying two intense radioactive sources, made of Cerium (antineutrino) and Chromium (neutrino), respectively, in a dedicated pit located beneath the det…
Dry deposition models for radionuclides dispersed in air: a new approach for deposition velocity evaluation schema
2017
In the framework of a National Research Program funded by the Italian Minister of Economic Development, the Department of Energy, Information Engineering and Mathematical Models (DEIM) of Palermo University and ENEA Research Centre of Bologna, Italy is performing several research activities to study physical models and mathematical approaches aimed at investigating dry deposition mechanisms of radioactive pollutants. On the basis of such studies, a new approach to evaluate the dry deposition velocity for particles is proposed. Comparisons with literature experimental data show that the proposed dry deposition scheme allows to capture the main phenomena involved in the dry deposition process…
Multinucleon transfer reactions: an overview of recent results
2012
Large acceptance magnetic spectrometers, such as PRISMA installed at Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro, gave a further boost to the renewed interest for multinucleon transfer reactions in the last decade. The large solid angles of these devices and the high resolving powers of their detection systems allowed to investigate the transfer process around and well below the Coulomb barrier and to perform nuclear structure studies in several mass regions of the nuclide chart when coupled with large γ-ray arrays such as CLARA. Selected results obtained with the PRISMA-CLARA set-up in odd argon isotopes populated by using the multinucleon transfer process and in sub- barrier transfer measurements are…
Solar neutrino detectors as sterile neutrino hunters
2016
International audience; The large size and the very low radioactive background of solar neutrino detectors such as Borexino at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy offer a unique opportunity to probe the existence of neutrino oscillations into new sterile components by means of carefully designed and well calibrated anti-neutrino and neutrino artificial sources. In this paper we briefly summarise the key elements of the SOX experiment, a program for the search of sterile neutrinos (and other short distance effects) by means of a (144)Ce-(144)Pr anti-neutrino source and, possibly in the medium term future, with a (51)Cr neutrino source.