ANALYSIS OF HEAVY-ION REACTION PROCESSES AND PRODUCTION OF MEDICAL RADIOISOTOPES

Abstract

Atomic nuclei are astonishing minuscule cores of matter particles that reflect Nature’s marvelous depth of precision. The advancement in technological tools since the 20th century has led us to extract immense information about nuclei through nuclear reactions and utilize that in a fruitful manner. The state-of-the-art accelerator facilities, detection techniques, and allied set-ups are prerequisites for exploring the dynamics of nuclear interactions. Low-energy heavy-ion-induced reactions on medium mass targets are the gateway to understanding nuclear structural features and the production of noble elements of societal applications. In the low-energy regime of ≤ 10 MeV/nucleon, the fusion-evaporation phenomenon dominates, but its current knowledge stands on the shoulders of scarce experimental data. There has been a constant interest and insatiable curiosity in comprehending the fusion in the energy region around the Coulomb barrier. The role of various structural degrees of freedom of interacting nuclei and neutron transfer in influencing the fusion probability is well established, yet the degree of involvement is often debated. Similarly, the nature of fusion, i.e., complete-incomplete fusion and its variation with incident energy, the effect of cluster-structure of the projectile, and the evolution mechanism of an excited composite system to form the compound nucleus, are open research questions of current interest. A well-deserved spotlight is gathered by reactions producing neutron-deficient noble-metal radionuclides of potential diagnostic and therapeutic applications in the healthcare sector.