By Linus Oota, Lafia

Federal University of Lafia has procured ORTEC/AMETEK High Purity Germanium (HPGe) gamma/nuclear detector with its accessories such as Möbius Recycler Condensing Liquid Nitrogen Cooling System.

This development is in line with the vision of the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Shehu Abdul Rahman, to make FULafia one of the best five universities in Africa.

Director of TETFund Center in the university, Dr Abubakar Sadiq Aliyu, disclosed this to our correspondent yesterday in Lafia.

Sadiq said that the newly acquired Möbius Recycler “provides an excellent strategy for managing counting laboratories which have periodic power failures,” adding that “This will help us manage the consumption of liquid nitrogen.”

The HPGe detector remains the choice for the detection of photons in the range of MeV or higher, down to the hard X-ray range.

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The HPGe is widely used in the measurement of gamma radioactivity from environmental/industrial samples, he said.

It would be recalled that the centre recently announced that it has commercialised some of its services, including DNA Extraction, PCR Amplification, 16 Runs of Gel Electrophoresis, AAS Analysis per sample, Computation and Data Analyses with High Performance Computing System, and Material Characterisation with UV-VIS Spectroscopy.

Others soon to be commercialised by the centre include HBGe Gamma Spectroscopy, Gross Alpha/Beta Counting, Alpha Spectroscopy, Material Characterisation with XRD Spectroscopy, Materials Characterisation/Chemical Analyses with FTIR Spectroscopy, Materials Characterisation/Chemical Analyses using NMR and Analyses with FTIR.

According to Sadiq, until recently, scientists were using the HPGe for characterisation of materials by altering the geometry of the detector arrangements and sandwiching positron sources into the material of interest.

He pointed out that now, with the HPGe detector, Gross alpha/beta counting system and Alpha spectrometer, the Muhammadu Buhari TETFund Centre of Excellence, Federal University of Lafia, possesses one of the best nuclear science research laboratories in the region.

He said: “The MBTCE aimed to train scientists in frontier research and equip them with skills needed for economic development of the nation.