Nuclear Seminar

Half-Life of Fe-60

Dr. Georg Rugel
TU Munich, Germany

Monday, August 24, 2009   4:00 p.m.   NSH 124
(Refreshments served prior to seminar in NSH 124)

The radioisotope Fe-60 plays an eminent role in astrophysics.  Until now there exists only a single measurement of the half-life by Kutschera et al., NIMB5, 430 (1984).  The reported half-life is 1.49+/-0.27 Myr.  I will point out the importance of the half-life for the early solar system history, nucleosynthesis and gamma ray astronomy and for the accretion of life Fe-60 on earth.  Then I will report on our measurements yielding a significantly longer and much more precise half-life of 2.62+/-0.04 Myr (PRL 103 (2009) in press).