[en] Bank voles were trapped in the neighborhood of the Sendzimir steelworks in Krakow and the ZGH Boleslaw zinc smelter in Bukowno. The Borecka forest in the north of Poland served as a control area. Lead, cadmium, zinc, and iron concentrations were analyzed in the liver, kidneys, testes, and femur bones of the bank voles. Typically, high levels of lead and cadmium were found in the bones and kidneys, respectively. In the femurs of the rodents from Bukowno, 109.26 μg g^-1 dry weight of lead was detected. The kidneys of these animals had accumulated 32.98 μg g^-1 cadmium. Concentrations of zinc and iron in the tissues were at physiological levels. No damage was found in the tissues of the bank voles from the Borecka forest or in the testes of animals from other areas. Histopathological changes in the kidneys of the rodents from Krakow as well as changes to the liver and kidneys of the animals from Bukowno were demonstrated

[en] Optical frequency comb technology has been used in this work for the first time to investigate the nuclear structure of light radioactive isotopes. Therefore, three laser systems were stabilized with different techniques to accurately known optical frequencies and used in two specialized experiments. Absolute transition frequency measurements of lithium and beryllium isotopes were performed with accuracy on the order of 10^-10. Such a high accuracy is required for the light elements since the nuclear volume effect has only a 10^-9 contribution to the total transition frequency. For beryllium, the isotope shift was determined with an accuracy that is sufficient to extract information about the proton distribution inside the nucleus. A Doppler-free two-photon spectroscopy on the stable lithium isotopes ^6,7Li was performed in order to determine the absolute frequency of the 2S → 3S transition. The achieved relative accuracy of 2 x 10^-10 is improved by one order of magnitude compared to previous measurements. The results provide an opportunity to determine the nuclear charge radius of the stable and short-lived isotopes in a pure optical way but this requires an improvement of the theoretical calculations by two orders of magnitude. The second experiment presented here was performed at ISOLDE/CERN, where the absolute transition frequencies of the D₁ and D₂ lines in beryllium ions for the isotopes ^7,9,10,11Be were measured with an accuracy of about 1 MHz. Therefore, an advanced collinear laser spectroscopy technique involving two counter-propagating frequency-stabilized laser beams with a known absolute frequency was developed. The extracted isotope shifts were combined with recent accurate mass shift calculations and the root-mean square nuclear charge radii of ^7,10Be and the one-neutron halo nucleus ¹¹Be were determined. Obtained charge radii are decreasing from ⁷Be to ¹⁰Be and increasing again for ¹¹Be. While the monotone decrease can be explained by a nucleon clustering inside the nucleus, the pronounced increase between ¹⁰Be and ¹¹Be can be interpreted as a combination of two contributions: the center-of-mass motion of the ¹⁰Be core and a change of intrinsic structure of the core. To disentangle these two contributions, the results from nuclear reaction measurements were used and indicate that the center-of-mass motion is the dominant effect. Additionally, the splitting isotope shift, i.e. the difference in the isotope shifts between the D₁ and D₂ fine structure transitions, was determined. This shows a good consistency with the theoretical calculations and provides a valuable check of the beryllium experiment. (orig.)

[en] Did you know that the food in your kitchen may not be what it seems and may not correspond to the information on the label? Fraudsters have surreptitiously entered the lucrative global food market and have developed methods to scam food consumers for profit. These include producing counterfeit foodstuffs that imitate certain recipes or brands; adding undeclared materials to food; diluting or substituting high value ingredients with lower value ones; concealing poor quality ingredients; and mislabelling. Food fraud not only impacts consumers' wallets and harms international trade but can also jeopardize public health and safety. Food fraud can be defined as any action taken with the intention of deceiving customers about the identity, quality and composition of food products for financial gain. The exact cost of this type of fraud to the global food industry is difficult to calculate given its clandestine nature, but it is estimated to cost producers $40 billion annually. The IAEA, through its research and technical cooperation programmes and joint efforts with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), supports countries to use nuclear and related techniques to tackle food fraud by tracing the origin of food, verifying its authenticity and testing for adulterants. Food authenticity and traceability methods, such as stable isotope analysis, can help identify and prevent food fraud and protect public health.

[en] Did you know that the food in your kitchen may not be what it seems and may not correspond to the information on the label? Fraudsters have surreptitiously entered the lucrative global food market and have developed methods to scam food consumers for profit. These include producing counterfeit foodstuffs that imitate certain recipes or brands; adding undeclared materials to food; diluting or substituting high value ingredients with lower value ones; concealing poor quality ingredients; and mislabelling. Food fraud not only impacts consumers' wallets and harms international trade but can also jeopardize public health and safety. Food fraud can be defined as any action taken with the intention of deceiving customers about the identity, quality and composition of food products for financial gain. The exact cost of this type of fraud to the global food industry is difficult to calculate given its clandestine nature, but it is estimated to cost producers $40 billion annually. The IAEA, through its research and technical cooperation programmes and joint efforts with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), supports countries to use nuclear and related techniques to tackle food fraud by tracing the origin of food, verifying its authenticity and testing for adulterants. Food authenticity and traceability methods, such as stable isotope analysis, can help identify and prevent food fraud and protect public health.

[en] In this work, three members of the RERh${}_2$Si${}_2$ (RE = rare earth) series have been studied by means of UV and soft X-ray ARPES in combination with ab initio band structure calculations, XMLD and high resolution Compton scattering. Hereby, various aspects of the rich 4f physics in these rare-earth-based intermetallics have been highlighted, which include itinerant surface magnetism, Fermi surface folding across an antiferromagnetic phase transition and the Fermi surface crossover with temperature in a Kondo lattice. GdRh${}_2$Si${}_2$ is an antiferromagnet with alternating layers of ferromagnetically coupled Gd layers, which are separated by Si-Rh-Si buffers. Our combined UV-ARPES experiments and electronic structure calculations show that cleavage along a basal plane leaves behind either a Gd- or a Si-terminated surface, where the latter bears two distinct two-dimensional electron states (2DESs): a purely two-dimensional Shockley surface state and a Dirac-cone-type surface resonance. Both 2DESs at the Si-terminated surface couple via exchange interaction to the large Gd 4f moments buried below the topmost Si-Rh-Si trilayer and reveal a strong spin splitting with values up to ~185 meV in the Shockley state, when the magnetic ordering evolves. Our UV-ARPES and XMLD results suggest that both 2DESs play a decisive role in the mediation of the magnetic ordering at the surface, which first develops independently from the ordering in the bulk even far below the Néel temperature of 107 K, before it connects to the bulk magnetism at ~60 K. We further studied the influence of potassium deposition on the 2DESs by ARPES. In addition, our calculations suggest a small splitting of the Shockley surface state even in the paramagnetic phase and an unusual Rashba-like spin texture with a triple winding of the electron spins along the Fermi surface contour. However, in the present work this small splitting could not be resolved by the ARPES experiments due to the large lifetime broadening of the surface bands. The rest of this work takes a closer look at the bulk Fermi surface of the prominent heavy-fermion compound YbRh${}_2$Si${}_2$. We first established with the help of UV-ARPES measurements on EuRh${}_2$Si${}_2$, that the large Fermi surface in YbRh${}_2$Si${}_2$, which has previously been observed at low temperatures down to 1 K, indeed contains one additional hole per unit cell originating from the delocalized degree of freedom of the 4f hole in accordance with Luttinger’s Fermi surface sum rule, even though the Yb valence deviates only very slightly from Yb${}^{3+}$. This finding confirms, that the observed large Fermi surface in YbRh${}_2$Si${}_2$ is indeed a manifestation of a true many-body effect arising from strong electronic correlations. We have hereby made usage of the unique property of EuRh${}_2$Si${}_2$ being the only compound in the RERh${}_2$Si${}_2$ series with a divalent rare-earth ion. This offers the valuable opportunity to gauge experimentally and in the absence of strong renormalization effects on the electronic structure the topology and size of the large Fermi surface, which is expected for a nearly trivalent RERh${}_2$Si${}_2$ Kondo lattice. Upon entering the antiferromagnetic phase, the Fermi surface of EuRh${}_2$Si${}_2$ is subject to band folding, as observed by soft X-ray ARPES, due to the doubled size of the unit cell. This leads to a pronounced splitting and fragmentation of the Fermi surface, which could clearly be observed in the Fermi surface maps obtained by high-resolution UV-ARPES. In light of certain parallels between EuRh${}_2$Si${}_2$ and YbRh${}_2$Si${}_2$ concerning magnetic correlations, these findings might suggest that qualitatively similar changes of the Fermi surface topology upon entering the antiferromagnetic phase might also be of relevance for YbRh${}_2$Si${}_2$. This might have serious implications for the understanding of the enigmatic quantum phase transition in this compound and should certainly be taken into account. We have further addressed the long-standing problem of the temperature dependence of the Fermi volume in Kondo lattices. Theory predicts a crossover of the Fermi surface from large to small upon increasing temperature, as the 4f electron (or hole in Yb-based Kondo lattices) leaves the strong-coupling regime, where its degree of freedom is dissolved into the Fermi sea, and becomes effectively localized and decoupled from the conduction band. However, a comprehensive experimental proof of this prediction is still lacking to date. In this work, we have employed high-resolution Compton scattering to derive the EOND of YbRh${}_2$Si${}_2$, which can be viewed as the projection of the Fermi volume onto a two-dimensional plane in momentum space. Our measurements have indeed revealed pronounced changes in the EOND of YbRh${}_2$Si${}_2$ between 14 K and 300 K, which can be attributed to a reconstruction of the Fermi surface with increasing temperature. Comparison to equivalent measurements on YbCo${}_2$Si${}_2$, a reference system for the small Fermi surface, allowed us to conclude, that the YbRh${}_2$Si${}_2$ EOND at 300 K reflects a small Fermi surface, which results from a transition of the Fermi volume from large to small due to the temperature-driven breakdown of the Kondo lattice effect. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experiment of this kind, which comprehensively visualizes the Fermi surface transition with temperature over the whole Brillouin zone in an Yb-based Kondo lattice.

[en] Did you know that the food in your kitchen may not be what it seems and may not correspond to the information on the label? Fraudsters have surreptitiously entered the lucrative global food market and have developed methods to scam food consumers for profit. These include producing counterfeit foodstuffs that imitate certain recipes or brands; adding undeclared materials to food; diluting or substituting high value ingredients with lower value ones; concealing poor quality ingredients; and mislabelling. Food fraud not only impacts consumers' wallets and harms international trade but can also jeopardize public health and safety. Food fraud can be defined as any action taken with the intention of deceiving customers about the identity, quality and composition of food products for financial gain. The exact cost of this type of fraud to the global food industry is difficult to calculate given its clandestine nature, but it is estimated to cost producers $40 billion annually. The IAEA, through its research and technical cooperation programmes and joint efforts with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), supports countries to use nuclear and related techniques to tackle food fraud by tracing the origin of food, verifying its authenticity and testing for adulterants. Food authenticity and traceability methods, such as stable isotope analysis, can help identify and prevent food fraud and protect public health.

[en] Automatic translation: Within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the removal of fissile material for unauthorized purposes is to be prevented worldwide through complete monitoring of the fuel cycle (safeguard). Measuring methods are necessary for the realization, which allow the discovery, identification and quantitative analysis of fissile material with sufficient accuracy. In particular, the following are required: high throughput, extensive automation and reliability under operating conditions. A strategic point in the fuel cycle is entry into the processing plant, where the ability to monitor unit count is lost. Non-destructive measuring methods can be used here to determine the amount of fissile identify material before it becomes publicly available. In order to determine the fissile material content of fuel elements non-destructively, one can either measure the self-radiation of the fissile materials and their daughter cores (“passive” method), or one excites the nuclides to be measured to fission by suitable irradiation and then measures the subsequent radiation (''Active'' procedure). Passive methods are generally less complicated than active ones because no source is required. However, their applicability is essentially limited to unirradiated samples. Active methods have the advantage that the radiation to be measured is induced in a precisely known manner. For example, by choosing a suitable irradiation profile, you can optimize the yield of secondary radiation to be measured.

[en] Models with a warped extra dimension, so-called Randall-Sundrum models, provide an appealing solution to the gauge and flavour hierarchy problems of the Standard Model. After introducing the theoretical basics of such models, we concentrate on a specific model whose symmetry structure is extended to protect the T parameter and the Zb_L anti b_L coupling from large corrections. We introduce the basic action and discuss in detail effects of electroweak symmetry breaking and the flavour structure of the model. Then we analyse meson-antimeson mixing and rare decays that are affected by new tree level contributions from the Kaluza-Klein modes of the gauge bosons and from the Z boson in an important manner. After deriving analytic expressions for the most important K and B physics observables, we perform a global numerical analysis of the new effects in the model in question. We confirm the recent findings that a stringent constraint on the model is placed by CP-violation in K⁰ - anti K⁰ mixing. However, even for Kaluza-Klein particles in the reach of the LHC an agreement with all available data can be obtained without significant fine-tuning. We find possible large effects in either CP-violating effects in the B_s - anti B_s system or in the rare K decays, but not simultaneously. In any case the deviations from the Standard Model predictions in the rare B decays are small and difficult to measure. The specific pattern of new flavour effects allows to distinguish this model from other New Physics frameworks, which we demonstrate explicitly for the case of models with Minimal Flavour Violation and for the Littlest Higgs model with T-parity. (orig.)

[en] Did you know that the food in your kitchen may not be what it seems and may not correspond to the information on the label? Fraudsters have surreptitiously entered the lucrative global food market and have developed methods to scam food consumers for profit. These include producing counterfeit foodstuffs that imitate certain recipes or brands; adding undeclared materials to food; diluting or substituting high value ingredients with lower value ones; concealing poor quality ingredients; and mislabelling. Food fraud not only impacts consumers' wallets and harms international trade but can also jeopardize public health and safety. Food fraud can be defined as any action taken with the intention of deceiving customers about the identity, quality and composition of food products for financial gain. The exact cost of this type of fraud to the global food industry is difficult to calculate given its clandestine nature, but it is estimated to cost producers $40 billion annually. The IAEA, through its research and technical cooperation programmes and joint efforts with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), supports countries to use nuclear and related techniques to tackle food fraud by tracing the origin of food, verifying its authenticity and testing for adulterants. Food authenticity and traceability methods, such as stable isotope analysis, can help identify and prevent food fraud and protect public health.

[en] The main problem in view of the direct disposal of the nuclear graphite is its large volume. This waste contains long-lived and short-lived radionuclides which determine the waste strategy. The irradiated graphite possess high amount of the ¹⁴C isotope. The main object of the present work was the selective separation of ¹⁴C isotope from the isotope ¹²C by thermal treatment (pyrolysis, partial oxidation). A successful separation could reduce the radiotoxicity and offer a different disposal strategy. Three different graphite types were investigated. The samples originate from the reflector and from the flaking of spherical fuel elements of the high-temperature reactor (AVR) Juelich. The samples from the thermal column of the research reactor (Merlin, Juelich) were also investigated. The maximum tritium releases were obtained both in inert gas atmosphere (N₂) and under water vapour-oxidizing conditions at 1280 C and 900 C. Furthermore it could be shown that 28% of ¹⁴C could be released under inert gas conditions at a 1280 C. By additive of oxidizing agent such as water vapour and oxygen the ¹⁴C release could be increased. Under water vapour-oxidizing conditions at a temperature of 1280 C up to 93% of the ¹⁴C was separated from the graphite. The matrix corrosion of 5.4% was obtained. The selective separation of the ¹⁴C is possible, because a substantial part of the radiocarbon is bound near the grain boundary surfaces. (orig.)