Activation Cross Sections of Deuteron-Induced Reactions on Natural Palladium for ¹⁰³Ag Production

Cross sections to produce medical radioactive isotopes (RI) are one of the important nuclear data for therapy and diagnostics in nuclear medicine. The data are fundamental information for production of the required RI with less by-products. Palladium-103 (T_1/2 = 16.991 d) is a medical RI available for brachytherapy. One possible way to obtain ¹⁰³Pd with less by-products is a generation of ¹⁰³Pd from its parent, ¹⁰³Ag (T_1/2 = 65.7 min). Therefore, the production cross sections of ¹⁰³Ag are worthy investigated. Among a variety of reactions to produce ¹⁰³Ag, the deuteron-induced reaction on ^natPd was found in the EXFOR database. However, the energy region of the previous studies is up to 20.3 MeV and the data in the higher energy region is required. In this paper, we report a preliminary result of an experiment to obtain the excitation function of the ^natPd(d,x)¹⁰³Ag reaction up to 24 MeV.