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Study on quench effects in liquid scintillation counting during tritium measurements

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Abstract

Quench effects can cause a serious reduction in counting efficiency for a given sample/cocktail mixture in liquid scintillation counting (LSC) experiments. This paper presents a simple experiment performed in order to test the influence of quenching on the LSC efficiency of 3H. The aim of this study was to investigate the behavior of several quench agents with different quench strengths (nitromethane, nitric acid, acetone, dimethyl-sulfoxide) added in different amounts to tritiated water in order to obtain standard sets for quench calibration curves. The OptiPhase HiSafe 2 and OptiPhase HiSafe 3 scintillation cocktails were used in this study in order to compare their quench resistance. Measurements were performed using a low-level LS counter (Wallac, Quantulus 1220).

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of Serbia, within the project Biosensing Technologies and Global System for Continuous Research and Integrated Management No. 43002 and the Provincial Secretiariat for Science and Technological Development within the project Development and Application of Low-background Alpha, Beta Spectroscopy for the Investigation of Radionuclides in Nature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Ivana Jakonić

  2. Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Jovana Nikolov, Nataša Todorović & Miroslav Vesković

  3. Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Branislava Tenjović

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  1. Ivana Jakonić
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  2. Jovana Nikolov
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  3. Nataša Todorović
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  4. Branislava Tenjović
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  5. Miroslav Vesković
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Correspondence to Ivana Jakonić.

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Jakonić, I., Nikolov, J., Todorović, N. et al. Study on quench effects in liquid scintillation counting during tritium measurements. J Radioanal Nucl Chem 302, 253–259 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-014-3191-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-014-3191-1

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