Counting Results for Acid used to soak the UA AmBe Source




Zelimir Djurcic and Andreas Piepke
University of Alabama
(Status 9/14/2002)




Results
After the UA AmBe source had been subjected to a pressure test it was decided to perform another acid leak test to re-certify the source and make sure it had not been damaged.
Evgueni soaked UA's AmBe source for 6 days in dilute nitric (concentration not known at this time). The soaking was concluded 8/20/2002 and the acid shipped to UA for counting, where it was received 8/27/2002. This data was presented on the KamLAND Collaboration meeting 9/7/2002.
Details of the soaking and counting procedure have been reported in previous reports and will therefore not be repeated here.
No evidence for an 241Am activity was found in the soak acid. We can place a 90% cl. limit of 145 mBq on the Am activity present on the surface of the source.
The following figures show the energy spectra taken with UA's low background Ge detector with and without the source soak acid. [link to PDF file] Figure 1: Energy around 60 keV were a peak would be expected in case of an Am contamination. For the quantitative analysis the position and width of the hypothetical Am activity were fixed.

[link to PDF file] Figure 2: Detector background around 60 keV.

[link to PDF file] Figure 3: Spectrum taken with a 241Am activity in the same geometry as the acid run, to show that the peak is at the correct position.


This page is maintained by A. Piepke
Last update September 14, 2002