https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201714610015
A low background ionisation chamber for alpha-spectroscopy
1 Institut für Kern- und Teilchenphysik, TU-Dresden, Dresden, Germany
2 Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Dresden, Germany
a e-mail: heinrich.wilsenach@mailbox.tu-dresden.de
Published online: 13 September 2017
The goal of designing a low background ionisation chamber is to measure long lived α-decay half-lives which might interfere with rare event searches. Such decays play a part in many fields in nuclear physics and are difficult to measure. A lot of Geiger-Nutall studies also depend on them. Among others the research is specifically aimed at the precision measurements of α emitters mainly within the Lanthanide region. The excellent energy resolution would also allow to search for excited states in α-decays. To achieve this goal a gridded ionisation chamber was constructed using the Frisch-Grid design. A background rate of only 10.9(6) counts per day has been achieved in the energy region of 1 MeV to 9 MeV and improvements are possible. This low background rate and size of the chamber allows precision measurements of long living alpha decays with half-lives in the region of 1 × 1015 years.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
