MEDICIS – the facility, the collaboration, past and future operation

by Dr João Pedro Ramos (CERN ), Thierry Stora (CERN )

Tuesday 4 Jun 2019, 11:00 → 13:00 Europe/Rome

ROSTAGNI meeting room (INFN-LNL)

The MEDICIS facility aims at becoming a European leading facility for the production of non-conventional medical isotopes for research in treatment and diagnosis, notably exploiting electromagnetic mass separation. The MEDICIS Collaboration includes now a total of 10 partner institutes across Europe and is making adjustments for new ones to join in.
First operation with radioactive beam started in May 2018, after a short commissioning phase in December 2017. During 2018, more than 20 irradiations took place with more than 10 targets for machine development and experiments, as approved by the MEDICIS board. Steady progress was achieved while reaching the proposed milestones: a terbium release efficiency of - 5% with rhenium surface ion source, 100MBq range activities, and operation with Uranium Carbide targets.  Current isotopes produced at MEDICIS include: 149Tb, 152Tb, 155Tb,169Er and 165Tm and developments are being made to extend this list to 47Sc, 44Sc, 67Cu, 225Ra/Ac and others. Additionally KNO3 salt foil has been developed as a collection support which will simplify the radiochemistry steps in the future.
While CERN has currently entered its accelerator shutdown (LS2 - 2019/2020), MEDICIS will be able to resume operation in April 2019, using non-separated external sources from partners cyclotrons and nuclear reactors (e.g. Er, Tb, Sc, Ra/Ac). For 2019 operation MEDICIS is expected to run with laser ionization where more than a factor 10 in efficiency is expected for Tb activities and radiochemistry separation.