In the third seminar of the series, on February 15th at 15:00 CET,  Dr. Marcia Regina Dias Rodrigues will give a talk on “Radioisotopes production using lasers: from basic science to applications”.

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Link:  https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82703824645?pwd=rbEagGmtJFXvLdVennlLKdm3e3bDCl.1

 

 
Abstract:

Laser technologies improved after the understanding of the Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) which allows energetic laser beams to be compressed to tens of femtosecond (fs) pulse durations and focused to few mm. Protons of tens of MeV can be accelerated using for instance the Target Normal Sheath Acceleration (TNSA) method and focused on secondary targets. In such conditions, nuclear reactions can occur and radioisotopes relevant for medical purposes be produced. High repetition lasers can be used to produce enough isotopes for medical applications. This route is competitive to conventional methods mostly based on accelerators. In this paper we study the production of 67Cu, 63Zn, 18F and 11C currently used in positron emission tomography (PET) and other applications. At the same time, we study the reaction 10B(p,a)7Be and 70Zn(p,4n)67Ga to put further constraints to the proton distributions at different angles and to the reaction 11B(p,a)8Be relevant for energy production. The experiment was performed at the 1 petawatt (PW) laser facility at Vega III located in Salamanca-Spain. Angular distributions of radioisotopes in the forward (with respect to the laser direction) and backward directions were measured using a High Purity Germanium Detector (HPGE). Our results are reasonably reproduced by the numerical estimates following the approach of Kimura et al. (NIMA637(2011)167).

 
Short CV
Dr. Marcia Regina Dias Rodrigues is a physicist with over 20 years of experience in the field. She received her B.S. in Physics with Honors from the Institute of Physics at the University of São Paulo in 1998. She then went on to earn her M.Sc. in Nuclear Physics from the same institution in 2000, and her Ph.D. in Physics in 2004.
 
Dr. Marcia Regina Dias Rodrigues began her career as a Teaching and Research Assistant at the Institute of Physics at the University of São Paulo, where she worked from 2004 to 2006. She then served as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Laboratori Nazionali del Sud - Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (LNS-INFN) in Italy from 2006 to 2008. From 2009 to 2011, she was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M University.
 
In 2011, Dr. Marcia Regina Dias Rodrigues returned to the Institute of Physics at the University of São Paulo as an Assistant Professor, where she taught and conducted research until 2019. During this time, she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. Since 2017, she has been working as an Assistant Research Scientist at the Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M University.
 
Dr. Marcia Regina Dias Rodrigues 's research interests include nuclear physics, astrophysics, and medical radioisotope production. She has published numerous papers in these fields.
 
 
 
The seminar series is co-organized by HB11 Energy and COST ACTION PROBONO - CA21128 supported by COST - European Cooperation in Science and Technology
 

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