High Quality Actinide Targets

TL;DR

This paper details the preparation and characterization of high-quality actinide targets for nuclear fission studies, addressing issues like target uniformity, stability, and diagnostics for improved experimental accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces new methods for preparing and diagnosing actinide targets, including multi-isotopic configurations and techniques to measure fragment energy loss and pointing resolution.

Findings

Successful preparation of uniform, stable actinide targets

Effective diagnosis of crud problems in 248Cm and 252Cf sources

Enhanced measurement capabilities for fission fragment analysis

Abstract

We prepare high quality actinide targets for studies of neutron induced and charged particle induced fission. I report on our efforts to measure fragment energy loss in the target backings and to diagnose the crud problem frequently found in 248Cm and 252Cf sources and targets. I discuss the preparation of multi-isotopic targets for the Fission TPC and our efforts to measure the pointing resolution of this device. The issues of target uniformity, chemical composition and radiation stability of the targets are discussed along with problems of high/low specific activity regions in a single target.