Evaluation of proton induced reactions on 100Mo: New cross sections for production of 99mTc and 99Mo

The use of the 99Mo→99mTc generator in nuclear medicine is well established world wide. The production of the 99Mo (T1/2 = 66 h) parent as a fission product of 235U is largely based on the use of reactor technology. From the early 1990's accelerator based production methods to provide either direct produced 99mTc or the parent 99Mo, were studied and suggested as potential alternatives to the reactor based production of 99Mo. A possible pathway for the charged particle production of 99mTc and 99Mo is irradiation of molybdenum metal with protons via the reaction 100Mo(p,2n)99mTc and 100Mo(p,pn)99Mo, respectively. The earlier published excitation functions show large differences in their maximum that result in large differences in the calculated yields. We therefore decided to study the excitation function for these proton-induced reactions. In this work the newly measured excitation functions as well as an evaluation of earlier measured data and a discussion of the observed disagreements are presented.