Excitation function analysis of α+⁹⁵Mo reaction to produce medically relevant ⁹⁷Ru up to 60 MeV

⁹⁷Ru (T_1/2 = 2.83 d) is an application-based radioisotope that finds enormous demand in the present-day healthcare industry. It decays through e^- capture (100%) followed by intense γ-ray emission of 215.7 keV (85.6%), which offers efficient tumor diagnosis through imaging. The current study attempts to understand the reaction mechanism of ⁹⁷Ru production through the excitation function (EF) analysis of ⁹⁵Mo(α,2n)⁹⁷Ru reaction. The experimental data have been taken from the IAEA-EXFOR database, and the reactions have offered a reasonable production of ⁹⁷Ru. The production cross section has been compared with evaluated nuclear data from the data library TENDL-2019, 2021 based upon the reaction code TALYS. Additionally, we have incorporated the nuclear reaction code PACE4 and EMPIRE-3.2.2. PACE4 works on the Hauser-Feshbach (HF) formalism for the equilibrium (EQ) mechanism during the compound nuclear formation, while EMPIRE embodies a combination of distorted wave Born approximation (DWBA) for the direct reactions, HF formalism, and Exciton model for the EQ and pre-equilibrium (PEQ) reaction processes, respectively. The EGSM (Enhanced Generalized Superfluid Model) level density has been invoked. The reproducibility of EF using EMPIRE code has been found excellent for the experimental data in the entire energy region. The lower energy part can be explained by the inclusion of coupled channel code CCFUS for heavy-ions reactions, while the stark contrast in the high-energy part compared to PACE4 can be accounted to the PEQ emission of light particles and clusters, holistically covered by EMPIRE model code. The systematics can be further implemented for the efficient forecasting of unmeasured application-based isotopic data. (author)