Introduction to modern Nuclear Physics

• Nicolas Alamanos (CEA/SACLAY/IRFU)

Room: Aula 131

Introduction to modern Nuclear Physics

• Nicolas Alamanos (CEA/SACLAY/IRFU)

Room: Aula 131

How a small accelerator can be useful for interdisciplinary applications. Part I: the study of air pollution

• Franco Lucarelli (LABEC, INFN - Firenze)

Room: Aula 131 There is an increasing concern in European citizens about the problems related to the high levels of Particulate matter (PM) in our cities, which affects human health. Aerosol also affects climate change, directly by scattering and absorption of solar radiation and indirectly by impacting on cloud processes. In environmental sciences, Nuclear Physics plays an important role through the measurement of the elemental composition of the aerosol, in particular with PIXE, Particle Induced X-Ray Emission, which is a very sensitive method for detecting trace elements. A better knowledge of the aerosol composition helps to identify its sources. It also brings valuable information for epidemiological studies or to constraint climate models. With PIXE all the elements with Z > 10 are simultaneously detected in a very short measuring time (~ 60 sec respect to several minutes or hours typical of other competitive techniques); furthermore, no sample pre-treatment is necessary: this is especially important when samples with very low mass must be analyzed and therefore any contamination is dramatic (e.g. mineral aerosol in polar ice cores for paleo-climatic studies). However, a proper experimental set-up must be used to exploit all PIXE capabilities. Theoretical fundamentals, a description of the experimental set-up and some applications will be shown. ¬¬¬¬¬¬

Nuclear Physics applied to the production of Innovative Radio-Pharmaceuticals

• Andrea Fontana (INFN - Pavia)
• Luciano Canton (INFN - Padova)

Room: Aula 131 The lecture introduces the basic concepts related to radionuclide production at cyclotrons for radiopharmaceuticals application. The main goal is to find efficient production routes of novel radiopharmaceuticals (theranostics, multi-modal imaging, etc), with special considerations about purity and yields. There will be a discussion on the different reaction mechanisms (and the underlying theory) that are important for the production cross sections in the available energy regime. A survey of the most commonly used nuclear reaction codes for simulations and prediction of cross sections will be given. In the tutorial a set of exercises will illustrate how to calculate the activities and yields of the produced radionuclides as well as the various purities necessary for these applications.

Study of nuclear properties with muonic atoms

• Andreas Knecht (Paul Scherrer Institute)

Room: Aula 131 Muonic atoms as laboratories for fundamental physics provide crucial input to quantum electrodynamics, the weak interaction and the strong interaction. Muonic atoms spectroscopy, i.e. the detection of the muonic X-rays emitted subsequently to the atomic capture of a negative muon, has been a very extensively used technique to determine the extent of the nuclear charge distribution. This method for determining nuclear charge radii complements the knowledge from electron scattering experiments and laser spectroscopy. Other properties such as its quadrupole moment can be extracted as well. In addition to the muonic X-rays it is also possible to study the gamma rays emitted following the capture of the muon by the nucleus. This gives access to nuclear matrix elements and is especially relevant for neutrinoless double beta decay as the the momentum transfer in muon capture is high and thus very similar states can be probed. This lecture will describe the basic techniques of muonic atom spectroscopy and its application. It will conclude with a description of the muX experiment where we aim to perform muonic atom spectroscopy with targets available only in microgram quantities such as the highly radioactive Ra-226 isotope.

Radionuclides for nuclear medicine: the triumphs and challenges

• Nick van der Meulen

Room: Aula 131 Terbium is a unique element, as it provides a quadruplet of radionuclides suited for diagnostics and therapy in nuclear medicine [1]. Much success has been gained from the PSI-ISOLDE collaboration, with the collection and purification of 149Tb (α-emitter, T1/2 = 4.1 h), used for preclinical therapy studies [2] and PET imaging [3], and 152Tb (β+-emitter, T1/2 = 17.5 h), for preclinical [4] and clinical [5] PET imaging, respectively. Mass-separated beams of 149Tb and 152Tb, respectively, were implanted at ISOLDE-CERN into Zn-coated Au foils. With 1.5 hours of collection and 2 hours decay of co-implanted activities, up to 200 MBq 149Tb could be transported to PSI. Collections of 152Tb lasted 4 to 6 hours and up to 600 MBq 152Tb could be shipped to PSI. Both the means of collection at ISOLDE/CERN, as well as the chemical separation system at PSI, have been updated over the years, with the most significant upgrades taking place in 2017. The Tb was separated from its isobars and contaminants and directly employed for radiolabeling of various pharmaceuticals. PET/CT scans were performed with tumor-bearing mice at different time points after injection of the Tb-labelled radiopharmaceutical in question. The successful experimental runs have prepared the collaboration for proposed extended preclinical imaging and therapy experiments in future. This, along with more regular radionuclides produced for nuclear medicine, will be discussed. [1] C. Müller et al., J. Nucl. Med. 53, 1951 (2012). [2] C. Müller et al., J. Nucl. Med. 54, 124 (2013). [3] C. Müller et al., EJNMMI Radiopharmacy and Chemistry 1, 5 (2016). [4] C. Müller et al., EJNMMI Research 6, 35 (2016). [5] R. Baum et al., Dalton Transactions, 46, 14638 (2017).

From nuclear physics to applications: new detectors for radioactive waste monitoring

• Paolo Finocchiaro (LNS)

Room: Aula 131 Nuclear physics experiments are always in need of more and more advanced detection systems. During the last fifteen years new technological developments have come out with many improvements in terms of performance and compactness of detector materials, transducers, electronics, computing and data transmission. In light of these achievements some applications previously prohibitive because of size and cost are now feasible. New radiation sensors will be shown and explained, and the radioactive waste online monitoring application will be described, starting from the DMNR project at INFN-LNS and being finalized into the MICADO project recently approved by Euratom. Examples and operational details will be also provided during the tutorial session.

Pedestrian neutrons - tool and object for fundamental physics

• Oliver Zimmer (ILL - Grenoble)

Room: Aula 131 Free neutrons moving at pedestrian speed, also called Ultra-Cold Neutrons (UCNs), have low enough energy to become confined and manipulated in traps. Being electrically neutral but being affected by all known fundamental forces they are an excellent probe to study fundamental symmetries and interactions. Storage lifetimes of several hundred seconds enable high-precision experiments with impact on astrophysics and cosmology, complementary to high-energy physics. Although started more than 50 years ago, the search for a non-vanishing electric dipole moment of the neutron is currently a hot topic pursued by many research groups around the world. Increasingly accurate experiments test new scenarios of time reversal invariance violation which is required for an explanation of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe. Also the neutron lifetime is a key observable investigated with UCNs. It determines the primordial abundances of the light chemical elements after the big bang and is still astonishingly poorly known. A third example of present studies covered in this talk is a search for deviations from Newton’s gravity law at distances in the micrometre range, using spectroscopy of quantum states of the neutron confined by a horizontal mirror and gravity. Accuracies of most experiments using UCNs are still statistics limited and can thus be much improved with advances in UCN production, which is the goal of an ongoing development of superfluid-helium based UCN sources at the ILL in Grenoble.

How a small accelerator can be useful for interdisciplinary applications. Part II: cultural heritage studies

• Mariaelena Fedi (INFN - Firenze/LABEC)

Room: Aula 131 Archaeometry, i.e. that discipline where science and modern technology are employed to examine archaeological remains, and in general Cultural Heritage, has become so far an important support for archaeologists, restorers and all operators in humanities. Among all the possible issues that can raise in the Cultural Heritage framework, absolute dating and analysis of materials often constitute fundamental questions to be addressed. Nuclear physics, and in particular low voltage electrostatic accelerators, can allow us to solve such questions. In the lecture, we will discuss how Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) through the measurement of radiocarbon concentration and Ion Beam Analysis (IBA) can help us to date organic remains and to study the composition of artworks, respectively. Theoretical fundamentals and some applications will be shown.

The extremes of neutron richness

• Francisco Miguel Marqués (LPC - Caen)

Room: Aula 131 A neutron star is like a huge nucleus overwhelmed by the number of neutrons, contrary to 'real' nuclei, that have a similar number of neutrons and protons. Is this true? What if we could find or create nuclei without protons? How far can we go in neutron richness? Our common sense tells us that these neutral nuclei should not exist, but if they do they would change our knowledge on neutron stars, on the properties of nuclei in general, and ultimately on the nucleon-nucleon interaction itself, the building block of matter. This huge potential impact has pushed some 'crazy' nuclear physicists to search for them since the 1960s. The first positive hints appeared only in the XXI century, and nowadays several collaborations are trying to corner these weird objects and give a definite answer to this crucial question. In this lecture we will go through this exciting quest, that started with humble experiments and has now reached a stage of ambitious and sophisticated projects, both in experiment and theory.

Reach for the stars by digging in the dirt

• Shawn Bishop (TU - Münich)

Room: Aula 131 Massive stars, which terminate their evolution in a cataclysmic explosion called a type-II supernova, are the nuclear engines of galactic nucleosynthesis. Among the elemental species known to be produced in these stars, the radioisotope 60Fe stands out: This radioisotope has no natural, terrestrial production mechanisms; thus, a detection of 60Fe atoms within terrestrial reservoirs is proof for the direct deposition of supernova material within our solar system. We report, in this work, the direct detection of live 60Fe atoms in biologically produced nanocrystals of magnetite, which we selectively extracted from two Pacific Ocean sediment cores. We find that the arrival of supernova material on Earth coincides with the lower Pleistocene boundary (2.7 Ma) and that it terminates around 1.7 Ma. Additionally, a brief overview of a new r-process actinide search will also be discussed, time permitting.

Hadron therapy: from the conventional approach to laser-driven applications

• Giuseppe Cirrone (INFN - LNS)

Room: Aula 131 Hadron-therapy is the most advanced, still pioneering, external radiation therapy approach nowadays available for tumor irradiation. Charged particle acceleration using ultra-intense and ultra- short laser pulses has gathered a strong interest in the scientific community and it is now one of the most attractive topics in the relativistic laser-plasma interaction research. Indeed, it could represent the future of particle acceleration and open new scenarios in multidisciplinary fields, in particular, medical applications. One of the biggest challenges consists of using, in a future perspective, high-intensity laser-target interaction to generate high-energy ions for therapeutic purposes, eventually replacing the old paradigm of acceleration, characterized by huge and complex machines. The peculiarities of laser-driven beams led to develop new strategies and advanced techniques for transport, diagnostics and dosimetry of the accelerated particles, due to the wide energy spread, the angular divergence and the extremely intense pulses. In this framework, INFN-LNS (Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics, Catania (I)) in collaboration with ELI-Beamline Institute (Dolny Brezany, CZ) will realized an installed in 2018 the ELIMED (ELI-Beamlines MEDical and multidisciplinary applications) beam-line. ELIMED will be the first Users’ addressed transport beam-line dedicated to the medical and multidisciplinary studies with laser-accelerated ion beams and completely open to the scientific community wishing to perform experiments with these new beams. The beam-line will permit in-air irradiation of controlled laser-driven ion beams to perform typical multidisciplinary experiments, from biological irradiation to detector tests and general samples irradiation. In this talk, we will discuss, with a didactic approach, which is the status of Hadron-therapy around the world and which are the potentialities offered by laser-driven beams for its future developments

Neutron Technique in civil security applications

• Sandra Moretto (INFN - Padova)

Room: Aula 131 Non-destructive analysis (NDA) of materials is a well-known technique applied in several fields of bulk material analysis. It is a wide group of analysis techniques used in science and technology industry to evaluate the properties of a material, component or system without causing damage. In particular, we will focus on neutron based technique, like PGNAA (Prompt Gamma Neutron Activation Analysis), PFNA (Pulsed Fast Neutron Analysis), PFTNA (Pulsed Fast/Thermal Neutron Analysis), API (Associated Particle Imaging), FNGT (fast neutron and gamma transmission). These techniques have big application potential since they could provide data about large number of elements simultaneously and non-destructively together with valuable imaging and elemental information. For example in industrial applications (oil, coke, concrete..) and environmental research (soil moisture, snow..). In recent years significant and rapid developments in technologies such as the neutron sources and detectors together with still increasing computer power make possible to take the full advantage of this techniques and significantly broaden usage of neutron analysis in many different applications. Neutron interrogation techniques generally rely on bombarding the nuclei in the interrogated object with neutrons of particular energy or energies, causing them to emit characteristic γ- rays or alter the energy or the direction of the interrogating neutrons. A general overview of the neutron interactions will be presented, together with the main components of these techniques such as neutron sources, detectors and data analysis. Then, we will focus our attention on civil security examples using neutrons, for illicit threats, explosive and more general smuggling in airlines security screening and cargo container inspections.