New strategy can harvest chemical information on rare isotopes with a fraction of the material
Monday, June 5, 2023 - 16:18
in Physics & Chemistry
Studying radioactive materials is very difficult due to the potential health risks they pose to scientists. Expense is also a major barrier, with some radioisotopes costing more than $10,000 per microgram (or $10 billion per gram). Some radioisotopes cannot be produced in sufficient quantities, making them difficult to study in detail with current techniques. Scientists have recently developed a new approach to harvest detailed chemical information on radioactive and/or enriched stable isotopes. The new approach is much more efficient, requiring 1,000 times less material than previous state-of-the-art methods. It offers this efficiency with no loss of data quality.