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Chemical separation of 146Sm for half-life determination

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Abstract

Although methods for the chemical separation of samarium from a rock matrix are well established, chemical separation of samarium from non-natural isotopic impurities for the purpose of 146Sm half-life measurement requires modifications to these procedures, as well as additional checks for effective separation. This work describes the chemical purification procedures associated with the 146Sm source and the results from gamma spectroscopy. The purification procedure allowed for the quantitative determination of the number of 146Sm atoms using a modified isotope dilution technique. Alpha-decay counting of the sample will be applied in the future to determine the half-life of 146Sm.

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Acknowledgements

This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344 with release number LLNL-JRNL-834099. This work was funded by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (20-LW-024).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Ave, 94550, Livermore, CA, USA

    Quinn R. Shollenberger, Kelly N. Kmak, Corliss K.I. Sio, John D. Despotopulos, Geon-Bo Kim & Lars E. Borg

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Toronto, 22 Ursula Franklin Street, M5S 3B1, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Corliss K.I. Sio

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  1. Quinn R. Shollenberger
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  4. John D. Despotopulos
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Correspondence to Quinn R. Shollenberger.

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Shollenberger, Q.R., Kmak, K.N., Sio, C.K. et al. Chemical separation of 146Sm for half-life determination. J Radioanal Nucl Chem 331, 4963–4969 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-022-08531-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-022-08531-7

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