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Possible overestimation of isomer depletion due to contamination

Nature volume 594, pages E1–E2 (2021)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 02 June 2021

The Original Article was published on 08 February 2018

arising from C. J. Chiara et al., Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25483 (2018)

Highly excited metastable states, or isomers, of nuclei are considered as a potential new form of energy storage, if the energy of a long-lived isomer can be released by a controllable rapid process (isomer depletion). Chiara et al.1 provided the first experimental evidence of isomer depletion caused by nuclear excitation by electron capture (NEEC)2, with a rather large excitation probability of Pexc = 0.010(3), by exciting an isomer of molybdenum-93 to a higher state. By assessing the reported experimental results and analysis methods, we found that the complex γ background in that work was treated using two idealistic assumptions. Therefore, the observed isomer depletion could have been overestimated owing to residual contamination.

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Fig. 1: Experimental setup and estimated cross-section of 93Mo as a function of bombarding energy.
Fig. 2: Re-examination of k ratios.

References

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant number XDB34010000) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, under contracts U1832134 and U1932137.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of High Precision Nuclear Spectroscopy, Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Song Guo, Yongde Fang & Xiaohong Zhou

  2. School of Nuclear Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Song Guo, Yongde Fang & Xiaohong Zhou

  3. Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS/IN2P3, IJCLab, Orsay, France

    C. M. Petrache

Authors
  1. Song Guo
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  2. Yongde Fang
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  4. C. M. Petrache
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Contributions

S.G conceived the idea and wrote the first draft. Y.F., X.Z. and C.M.P edited and revised the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiaohong Zhou.

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Guo, S., Fang, Y., Zhou, X. et al. Possible overestimation of isomer depletion due to contamination. Nature 594, E1–E2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03333-5

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