Reduction of isotopically enriched ⁵⁰Ti-dioxide for the production of high-intensity heavy-ion beam

Abstract

Titanium-50 (⁵⁰Ti) is an important and often requested ion beam for nuclear physics’ experiments. While natural titanium of very high purity is available in different forms; enriched material can only be bought as the dioxide or the tetrachloride. These compounds cannot be processed from currently available ion sources with a sufficient beam quality and sufficient beam intensity for a long time. We describe here the process of converting titanium dioxide into the metal, the material analysis of the starting material as well as of the reduced material. Despite varying contamination levels of silicon, chlorine, and tin in the primary materials, we obtained high yields of metallic titanium with different contamination levels. The obtained metallic ⁵⁰Ti was applied at the accelerator UNILAC for the production of a high intensity ion beam for several month of beam time.