Commissioning the NNDC Decay Station: A high-resolution α-γ coincidence detector for nuclear applications

The National Nuclear Data Center (NNDC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is commissioning its first in-house decay station. It is capable of α-γ coincidence measurements with high-resolution, utilizing two high purity germanium (HPGe) detectors, two silicon surface barrier detectors, and a fully digitized data acquisition (DAQ) system. The detector chamber and supporting materials were modeled using 3D CAD software and the Geant4 Monte Carlo simulation toolkit. We are beginning high-resolution measurements of Actinium-225 (225-Ac), a nuclide of particular interest in radioimmunotherapy for its α-particle emission and its 10 day half-life. In this contribution, we will describe the decay station, the initial commissioning experiments, and future plans to further improve decay schemes and elucidate isotopes' nuclear structure properties.