Research Projects

Understanding heavy-ion interactions in weakly bound and cluster-structured projectiles is complex due to breakup phenomena in the nuclear force field. Reports for ?,?Li&?Be-induced reactions provide scattered information at limited energies and mutual disagreement in some aspects. ¹?B and ¹¹B-induced reactions are little explored compared to other weakly/tightly bound projectiles. The study proposes to study fusion phenomena of ¹?,¹¹B in nuclei with masses ~60-180 and separation of reaction products from the target matrix, focusing on producing medically relevant radionuclides. The strength of various reaction processes, such as CF-ICF, EQ, and PEQ, will be explored for ¹?,¹¹B interactions on Co, Y, Nb, Rh, Lu, Tm up to ~8MeV/A energy. The cross sections of residues will be measured using stacked-foil technique followed by gamma-spectrometry, and the measured data will be explained using reaction models. This will help fix the target thickness and projectile energy window to reduce isotopic interference and maximize the production of desired radionuclides. After optimizing production, the target will be dissolved to develop a chemical scheme to separate the desired radionuclide from other coproduced radionuclides and the bulk target. Various techniques, such as liquid-liquid extraction, solid-liquid extraction, and chromatography, will be used to separate products from the bulk matrix. The main focus will be on developing a simple, efficient, and fast separation technique to minimize the loss of radionuclides in the various chemical steps.