Rare isotope discoveries with digital electronics

✍ Scribed by R. Grzywacz; C.J. Gross; A. Korgul; S.N. Liddick; C. Mazzocchi; R.D. Page; K. Rykaczewski

• Book ID: 103862348
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 329 KB
• Volume: 261
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0168-583X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.nimb.2007.04.234

✦ Synopsis

The discovery of the new isotopes 109 Xe and 105 Te was enabled by the application of a new experimental method using selective pulse shape storage from silicon detectors with digital signal processing electronics. Essential data processing algorithms were developed, which are able to find unique nuclear decay signatures, such as overlapping alpha decay induced signals. An experiment using this method led to the simultaneous detection of isotopes with dramatically different half lives T 1/2 ( 109 Xe) = 13(2) ms and T 1/2 ( 105 Te) = 620(70) ns. The ground state decay energies have been measured to be E a ( 109 Xe) = 4062(7) keV and E a ( 105 Te) = 4703(5) keV via observation of correlated events in the decay chain 109 Xe ! 105 Te ! 101 Sn.