Speaker
Description
Zinc-65 (Zn-65) is a radionuclide of interest in the fields of medicine and gamma-ray spectroscopy, within which its continued use as a tracer and common calibration source necessitates increasingly-precise nuclear decay data. A Zn-65 dataset was obtained as part of the KDK ("potassium decay") experiment, whose apparatus consists of an inner X-ray detector and an efficient outer detector, the Modular Total Absorption Spectrometer (MTAS), to tag gamma rays. This setup allows for the discrimination of the electron capture decays of Zn-65 to the ground (EC) and excited (EC) states of Copper-65 (Cu-65) using an emerging technique for such a measurement, exploiting the high efficiency ($\sim$98%) of MTAS. Techniques used to obtain the ratio of EC to EC decays are applicable to the main KDK analysis, which is making the first such measurement for Potassium-40, a common background in rare-event searches such as those for dark matter. We present our current methodology and analysis procedures developed to obtain a novel measurement of the electron-capture decays of Zinc-65.
| email address | lilianna.hariasz@gmail.com |
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| Please select: Experiment or Theory | Experiment |
