Determination of the excitation function for the 10B(p,n)10C reaction with implications for the production of [10C]carbon dioxide for use as a PET tracer

To evaluate the possibilities of producing useful amounts of 10C (T1/2=19 s) for use as an on-line, steady state positron emission tomography (PET) tracer, the excitation function and the thick target yield for the 10B(p,n)10C reaction up to 30 MeV were measured using an adapted version of the stacked-foil technique. The radionuclidic purity of the produced 10C versus the inevitable 11C contamination was evaluated as function of target thickness and incident proton beam energy.