Depth-profiling of activity induced by 300 MeV/u 124Xe ions in aluminum: Ranges of heavy projectile fragments

Abstract

This work is a continuation of a series of publications devoted to the depth-profiling of activity induced by high-energy heavy-ions in selected accelerator-construction materials. An aluminum target in the stacked-foil configuration was irradiated by 300 MeV/u 124Xe ions. Depth-profiles of induced activity of selected nuclides were obtained by gamma-spectroscopy of individual target foils. Special attention was paid to heavy projectile-fragments and their ranges. Main profile-shape categories have been defined to illustrate typical shapes of the measured profiles. A new quantity – an activation depth – has been introduced and its dependence on the fragment atomic and mass number has been found. It is shown that this quantity is fragment-specific and can substitute the range, which is very useful in case of the activation experiments using the stacked-foil targets with depth resolution limited by the foil thickness. Apart from gamma-spectroscopic parameters and fundamental nuclear properties of the nuclides, the activation depth can be used as an additional nuclide-attribute supporting identification of the projectile fragments and verification of the range-calculating computer codes. Although the main attention of this paper is paid to presenting the new experimental results, comparison with supporting simulations with the aid of ATIMA and FLUKA2020 is included, too.