“Design and Fabrication of a New Measurement Setup and Target holder for a Germanium Detector.”

Taking a target and bombarding it with neutrons has a variety of uses . Neutron-capture reactions are necessary for the production of medical and industrial isotopes, and the understanding of synthesis of the elements in stars. Neutron capture activation experiments involve a beam of neutrons which capture on target nuclei . After capture, radioactive nuclei created by the reaction then decay with a characteristic decay which can then be used for identification purposes. Measuring how many decays from the neutron capture products allows the probability of interaction, the cross section, to be determined If the radioactive products decay by gamma-ray emission, these can be detected using germanium detectors which are good for this task due to their high energy resolution. In order for accurate results to be obtained from these detectors, the efficiency of these detectors need to be well understood. Getting a better understanding of the efficiency of the detectors requires calibrations of the detectors with different sources at different distances. A source holder which can be moved to different distances and a container to house the target during and after neutron-capture experiments were designed and constructed. After the two pieces of equipment are built, the next step is to conduct a neutron capture experiment with gold and terbium targets and measure the decay at different distances with the germanium detector to ensure that the system is behaving as expected. Ultimately, we would like to irradiate short-lived nuclei produced in fission reactions to understand the behavior of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons, and also the creation of new elements in neutron-star mergers.