Frankfurt 2014 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 55: Beschleuniger und Anwendungen kernphysikalischer Methoden

HK 55.6: Talk

Friday, March 21, 2014, 12:15–12:30, HZ 5

Alpha Spectroscopy — Felix Krueger, •Heinrich Wilsenach, and Kai Zuber — IKTP TU-Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Alpha decays from long living isotopes are one of the limiting backgrounds for experiments searching for rare decays with stringent background constrains, such as neutrinoless double beta decay experiments. It is thus very important to accurately measure the half-lifes of these decays, in order to properly model their background contribution. Therefore, it is important to be able to measure half-lifes from alpha decays of the order of 1×10¹⁵ yr. A measurement of such a long lived decay imposes, however, a series of challenges, where the correct discrimination between background and true signal is critical. There is also a more general interest in such long living half-life measurements, as their value depends crucially on the underlying nuclear model.

This work proposes a setup to measure long lived alpha decays, based on the design of the Frisch-Grid ionisation chamber. It will be shown that the proposed design provides a good separation of signal and background events. It will also be demonstrated that, with pulse shape analysis, it is possible to constrain the source position of the decay, further improving the quality of the data. A discussion of the characterisation of the detector will also be presented as well as some results obtained with calibration sources.