Dresden 2013 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 67: Nukleare Astrophysik

HK 67.7: Talk

Thursday, March 7, 2013, 15:45–16:00, HSZ-403

The thermal neutron capture cross section of ⁶⁰Fe — •Zuzana Slavkovská¹, Tanja Heftrich¹, Franz Käppeler², Claudia Lederer¹, Jörg Neuhausen³, René Reifarth¹, Stefan Schmidt¹, Dorothea Schumann³, Kerstin Sonnabend¹, and Anton Wallner⁴ — ¹Goethe Universität Frankfurt — ²Karlsruher Institut für Technologie — ³Paul Scherrer Institut — ⁴Australian National University

⁶⁰Fe is an interesting long-lived radioactive nucleus. With an half-live of 2.6 Myr, its decay can be observed in the center of our galaxy witnessing ongoing nucleosynthesis. In order to understand the production and destruction of ⁶⁰Fe in stars, it is important to determine the neutron capture cross section experimentally.

An ⁶⁰Fe sample, produced in the framework of the ERAWAST program at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, was irradiated at the research reactor TRIGA at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

The irradiation of the sample took place in May 2012. The counting of the reaction product, ⁶¹Fe, was undertaken using a HPGe detector. The thermal as well as the epithermal neutron flux during the irradiation were determined by simultaneous activation of zirconium foils. The activity of those foils was measured using the same γ-counting setup, which significantly reduced the systematic uncertainties.

This project was supported by the Helmholtz Young Investigator Project VH-NG-327 and the EuroGENESIS project MASCHE.