Feasibility Study of Internal Conversion Electron Spectroscopy of $^{229m}$Th

Abstract

With an expected energy of 7.8(5) eV, the isomeric first excited state in $^{229}$Th exhibits the lowest excitation energy of all known nuclei. Until today, a value for the excitation energy has been inferred only by indirect measurements. In this paper, we propose to use the internal conversion decay channel as a probe for the ground-state transition energy. MatLab-based Monte Carlo simulations have been performed to obtain an estimate of the expected statistics and to test the feasibility of the experiment. From the simulations we conclude, that with the presented methods an energy determination with a precision of better than 0.1 eV is possible.