ABSTRACT
Gibson et al. [2] report that radioactive atoms created by proton or deuteron irradiation usually have sufficiently high recoil energies that they are catapulted out of the NP in which they are produced and may pass through many other NPs before they come at rest in another one. This means that any ion-beam radiolabelling of a NP powder must be considered as an implantation of recoiling radionuclides. Energy and range of the recoils are determined by the nuclear reaction kinetics [3, 4], and, since most reactions in the proton-energy range relevant for the present case occur via the formation of a compound nucleus [5] a simple mathematical treatment is possible [3, 4].This consideration gave rise to the idea illustrated in Fig. 13.1 to irradiate a mixture of a fine-grained powder of a material in which an adequate radionuclide can be produced, with NPs in which no useful radionuclides can be obtained. In this way, the NPs could be radiolabelled by recoiling radionuclides with the desired properties.
