Harvesting 67Cu from the Collection of a Secondary Beam Cocktail at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory

Isotope harvesting is a promising new method to obtain isotopes for which there is no reliable continuous supply at present. To determine the possibility of obtaining radiochemically pure radioisotopes from an aqueous beam dump at a heavy-ion fragmentation facility, preliminary experiments were performed to chemically extract a copper isotope from a large mixture of projectile fragmentation products in an aqueous medium. In this work a 93 MeV/u secondary beam cocktail was collected in an aqueous beam stop at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) located on the Michigan State University (MSU) campus. The beam cocktail consisted of ∼2.9% 67Cu in a large mixture of co-produced isotopes ranging in atomic number from ∼19 to 34. The chemical extraction of 67Cu was achieved via a two-step process: primary extraction using a divalent metal chelation disk followed by anion-exchange chromatography. A significant fraction (74 ± 4%) of the 67Cu collected in the aqueous beam stop was recovered with ...