Tuesday, April 1, 2008 - 6:10 AM

Production of hydrogen with deuterium concentration less than 0.01 ppm by cryogenic distillation method

Alexander Vasilyev, Ivan Alekseev, Tom Banks, Oleg Fedorchenko, Vladimir Ganzha, Peter Kravtsov, Peter Kammel, Claude Petitjean, Genadi Semenchuk, Victor Trofimov, and Marat Vznuzdaev. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute

There are several applications requiring deuterium depleted hydrogen: “zero level samples” in fine isotopic analysis of hydrogen, some physical tasks such as MuCAP (Muon Capture on the Proton) experiment [1] etc. The best commercially available hydrogen has about 1 ppm deuterium concentration (natural hydrogen has about 140 ppm). New tasks in nuclear physics and in the precise hydrogen analyses need ultra pure isotopic hydrogen with deuterium concentration less than 1ppm. Cryogenic distillation allows producing hydrogen with the concentration of the deuterium less than 0.006 ppm. The hydrogen analysis was carried out on large tandem accelerator at Institute of Particle Physics, ETH-Zurich, Switzerland [2]. For the present time it is the most precise and sensitive method of hydrogen isotopic analysis and it confirmed the producing of most isotopically pure hydrogen in the world. MuCAP experiment is carried out at Paul Scherrer Institute using muon beam line of the 590 MeV proton accelerator. The problem of chemical purity of hydrogen is solved by introduction of circulating purification system [3]. To achieve a correction acceptable in the frames of the MuCAP precision goal, it’s necessary to have depleted hydrogen with low concentration. The cryogenic packed distillation column is the main element of the setup. An analysis of ortho-para hydrogen isomeric composition by gas chromatography method was used for a fast column performance evaluation during the tuning operations. 1. V.A. Andreev et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 99, 032002-1, (2007). 2. M. Suter et al., Nucl. Instrum. and Methods in Phys. Res., Sect. B 259, 165 (2007). 3. V. A. Ganzha et al., Nucl. Instrum. and Methods in Phys. Res., Sect. A 578 , 485 (2007).