Isotope production induced by 1.4 GeV PS Booster: reaction channels identified from secondary particle fields in thick targets

This note describes systematic investigations of isotope production channels in thick targets exposed to the PS Booster (PSB) beam at ISOLDE. Recent experimental results have shown that new important radionuclide beams could be produced such as Pb-nat(p,x)Hg-208 in thick lead targets. We introduce in this note calculations of the production yield of isotopes generated from the creation and re-interaction of α particles in thick lead, bismuth, thorium and uranium targets irradiated by the 1.4 GeV proton beam delivered from the CERN PS Booster at ISOLDE. It gives the production yields of several isotopes that are not directly predicted with FLUKA and its RESNUCLEI production card while keeping a reasonable CPU time. These isotopes are particularly produced from (α, xp) and (3H, yp) reactions, with x = 4, 5, 6 and y = 3, 4, 5. The production yields have been calculated for Pb-208, Bi-209, Th-232 and U-238 target nuclei. The TENDL-2019 library has been used to recover the production cross-sections together with the afore-mentioned version of FLUKA to score the α and 3H fluences. The calculation method was verified with the FLUKA predictions for the Bi-209(α,2n) reaction and the At-211 production yield, an isotope of high interest in nuclear medicine, as well as with the radionuclides which are produced via (3H,3p) and (α,2p) reactions. The computation and experimental data are in good agreement, providing an alternative method to evaluate the inventories of radionuclides of potential interest for target waste management, and for the physics and medical programs at ISOLDE and MEDICIS.