Measurement of activation cross sections of the proton induced nuclear reactions on palladium

Excitation functions of proton induced reactions on Pd are important for medical radioisotope production, for activation analysis, for development of low activation materials and other purposes. No experimental data exist in the literature for low and medium energy range protons. A detailed study of the excitation functions was performed up to 80 MeV proton energy by using the stacked foil irradiation technique and gamma-ray spectrometry. The irradiations were carried out at the external beam lines of the AVF cyclotron at the Tohoku University, Japan (80 and 70 MeV) and the CGR 560 cyclotron at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (38, 29 and 17 MeV). The beam intensity, the incident energy and the energy degradation were controlled by a method based on flux constancy via normalization to the parallel measured excitation functions of natAl(p,x)22,24Na and natCu(p,x)56,58Co, 62,65Zn monitor reactions. Excitation functions for direct and cumulative cross sections have been measured for the production of 105mg,106m,110mAg, 101Pd, 101mRh and 97Ru radionuclei. Calculations for the excitation functions using the Alice-IPPE code were performed with a view to estimate the weight of the different contributing reactions and to check the trend and the magnitude of the obtained experimental data. (author)