Reading material for a nice summer evening

Sitting in your deck chair with nothing to read? We have a solution for you!

A few weeks ago, Francisco Ponce of Lawrence Livermore / UC Davis finished his PhD thesis on the topic “High Accuracy Measurement of the Nuclear Decay of U-235m and Search for the Nuclear Decay of Th-229m”. In his studies, he searched for the IC electron in the de-excitation of the Th isomer, but was not sensitive to timescales in the µs range. Although eventually not successful, the PhD thesis still makes a nice reading. The thesis can be found here.

And while we’re at it, we would like to draw your attention to another study from Jason Burke’s LLNL group, which looked into the distribution of charge states of the Th-229 recoils following the alpha decay of U-233: this work can be found here.