New Experimentally Observable Gamma-ray Emissions from 241Am Nuclear Decay
Abstract
With the high resolution of microcalorimeter detectors, previously unresolvable gamma-ray lines are now clearly resolvable. A careful measurement of Am-241 decay with a large array of gamma-ray microcalorimeters has revealed never before seen or predicted gamma lines at 207.72 +/- 0.02 keV and 208.21 +/- 0.01 keV. These results were made possible by new microwave-multiplexing readout to increase the array size and improved analysis algorithms to eliminate spectral artifacts. We suggest nuclear levels from which these gamma-rays might originate and calculate branching ratios for these transitions from measurements of both mixed Pu-Am standards and a pure Am-241 source. These results have implications for nuclear material safeguards and accounting, particularly for microcalorimeter gamma spectrometers, which are now being adopted in nuclear safeguards analytical laboratories.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2103.15893,
title = {New Experimentally Observable Gamma-ray Emissions from 241Am Nuclear Decay},
author = {Katrina E. Koehler and Michael D. Yoho and Matthew H. Carpenter and Mark P. Croce and David J. Mercer and Chandler M. Smith and Aidan D. Tollefson and Duc T. Vo and Michael A. Famiano and Caroline D. Nesaraja and Daniel T. Becker and Johnathon D. Gard and Abigail L. Wessels and Douglas A. Bennett and J. A. B. Mates and Nathan J. Ortiz and Daniel R. Schmidt and Joel N. Ullom and Leila R. Vale},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.15893},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
7 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables