524 research outputs found
First Calorimetric Measurement of OI-line in the Electron Capture Spectrum of Ho
The isotope Ho undergoes an electron capture process with a
recommended value for the energy available to the decay, , of about
2.5 keV. According to the present knowledge, this is the lowest
value for electron capture processes. Because of that, Ho is the best
candidate to perform experiments to investigate the value of the electron
neutrino mass based on the analysis of the calorimetrically measured spectrum.
We present for the first time the calorimetric measurement of the atomic
de-excitation of the Dy daughter atom upon the capture of an electron
from the 5s shell in Ho, OI-line. The measured peak energy is 48 eV.
This measurement was performed using low temperature metallic magnetic
calorimeters with the Ho ion implanted in the absorber.
We demonstrate that the calorimetric spectrum of Ho can be measured
with high precision and that the parameters describing the spectrum can be
learned from the analysis of the data. Finally, we discuss the implications of
this result for the Electron Capture Ho experiment, ECHo, aiming to
reach sub-eV sensitivity on the electron neutrino mass by a high precision and
high statistics calorimetric measurement of the Ho spectrum.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
Prospects for measuring the 229Th isomer energy using a metallic magnetic microcalorimeter
The Thorium-229 isotope features a nuclear isomer state with an extremely low
energy. The currently most accepted energy value, 7.8 +- 0.5 eV, was obtained
from an indirect measurement using a NASA x-ray microcalorimeter with an
instrumental resolution 26 eV. We study, how state-of-the-art magnetic metallic
microcalorimeters with an energy resolution down to a few eV can be used to
measure the isomer energy. In particular, resolving the 29.18 keV doublet in
the \gamma-spectrum following the \alpha-decay of Uranium-233, corresponding to
the decay into the ground and isomer state, allows to measure the isomer
transition energy without additional theoretical input parameters, and increase
the energy accuracy. We study the possibility of resolving the 29.18 keV line
as a doublet and the dependence of the attainable precision of the energy
measurement on the signal and background count rates and the instrumental
resolution.Comment: 32 pages, 8 figures, eq. (3) correcte
Response Of Late Carboniferous And Early Permian Plant Communities To Climate Change
Late Carboniferous and Early Permian strata record the transition from a cold interval in Earth history, characterized by the repeated periods of glaciation and deglaciation of the southern pole, to a warm-climate interval. Consequently, this time period is the best available analogue to the Recent in which to study patterns of vegetational response, both to glacial-interglacial oscillation and to the appearance of warm climate. Carboniferous wetland ecosystems were dominated by spore-producing plants and early gymnospermous seed plants. Global climate changes, largely drying,forced vegetational changes, resulting in a change to a seed plant–dominated world, beginning first at high latitudes during the Carboniferous, reaching the tropics near the Permo-Carboniferous boundary. For most of this time plant assemblages were very conservative in their composition. Change in the dominant vegetation was generally a rapid process, which suggests that environmental thresholds were crossed, and involved little mixing of elements from the wet and dry floras
On the keV sterile neutrino search in electron capture
A joint effort of cryogenic microcalorimetry (CM) and high-precision
Penning-trap mass spectrometry (PT-MS) in investigating atomic orbital electron
capture (EC) can shed light on the possible existence of heavy sterile
neutrinos with masses from 0.5 to 100 keV. Sterile neutrinos are expected to
perturb the shape of the atomic de-excitation spectrum measured by CM after a
capture of the atomic orbital electrons by a nucleus. This effect should be
observable in the ratios of the capture probabilities from different orbits.
The sensitivity of the ratio values to the contribution of sterile neutrinos
strongly depends on how accurately the mass difference between the parent and
the daughter nuclides of EC-transitions can be measured by, e.g., PT-MS. A
comparison of such probability ratios in different isotopes of a certain
chemical element allows one to exclude many systematic uncertainties and thus
could make feasible a determination of the contribution of sterile neutrinos on
a level below 1%. Several electron capture transitions suitable for such
measurements are discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, 2 table
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