Production of noble gas isotopes by proton-induced reactions on lead and bismuth

Abstract

We measured integral thin target cross-sections for the proton-induced production of He-, Ne-, Ar-, Kr-, and Xe-isotopes from lead and bismuth from the respective reaction threshold up to 2.6 GeV. The production of noble gas isotopes from lead and bismuth is of special importance for design studies of accelerator driven nuclear reactors and/or energy amplifiers. For all experiments with proton energies above 200 MeV a new mini-stack approach was used instead of the stacked-foil technique in order to minimise influences of secondary particles. The phenomenology of the determined excitation functions enables us to distinguish between the different reaction modes fragmentation, hot and cold symmetric fission, asymmetric fission, and deep spallation. For lead more than 420 cross-sections for 23 nuclear reactions have been measured. While the lead data have already been published, here we present first results for the production of noble gas isotopes from bismuth. The experimental data are compared to results from the theoretical nuclear model code INCL4/ABLA. This comparison clearly indicates that experimental data are still needed because the predictive power of nuclear model codes, though permanently improving, does still not allow to reliably predict the cross-sections needed for most applications and irradiation experiments remain indispensable.