Johannes Sterba in Allgemein | 22. February 2019

Off to Munich – SAAGAS 27

The 27th Seminar on Activation Analysis and Gamma Spectrometry, or SAAGAS 27 will be hosted this year at the FRM II in Garching, Munich. It is the seminar of the “Arbeitskreis Analytik mit Radionukliden und Hochleistungsstrahlenquellen (ARH)” of the GDCh. I really love this seminar for several reasons: It was the first international conference where I gave a presentation (SAAGAS 20, in 2005!), it is traditionally nice to students and young scientists (there might be a connection here ;-)) and the regular crowd there is friendly, easy-going and by now a group of friends.

We had the pleasure to host the SAAGAS meeting twice at the Atominstitut, TU Wien, in 2009 (22nd seminar) and in 2017 (26th seminar), in both cases we had a lot of fun (and work) and, I believe, successful seminars.

For this coming SAAGAS I’m taking along almost all our students, so team ATI will show up with a total of eight people! I strongly believe that the SAAGAS is one of the conferences were students can give their first presentations in a realistic but save and friendly environment, so out of the four presentations prepared, three will be first-timers. What we’ll see (in the order of appearance):

Progress toward production and characterization of a Technetium-99 reference sample for accelerator mass spectroscopy (V. Halubtsova)
Characterization of the precipitation of traces of Technetium with Iron carriers (E. Gull)
Characterization of natural clinoptilolite material for remediation of Sr-90 and Cs.137 in seawater (V. Grill)
Preparation of Thorium and Uranium targets for the NuClock project (V. Rosecker)
Neutronenaktivierungsanalyse und Gammaspektroskopie von Kaffee (T. Mittersteiner)

I’m really looking forward to seeing my students present!

Back from MARC…

Instead of watching the falling snow outside my window right now, I’d much rather remember last April when I got to spend a week on beautiful Hawaii participating in the MARC XI conference. It was great to see old friends again and meet new people. There was quite a large group of students there, too, […]

Sterba and Sterba

For quite a while now I was hoping that at some point I’d be able to publish a paper together with my father, but up to now our respective fields of work were too divergent. Some time ago, he asked me for help on figuring out some multi-dimensional integrals, because he believed that a measure […]

Sample preparation of ceramic sherds

To get good analytical data, sample preparation is probably the most important step in the process to get right. Any mistake that happens here will significantly influence the final data, which is bad enough, but, to make things worse, it will not be obvious that something went wrong! So during sample preparation we have to […]

Annual INSEN meeting 2018

This year I am finally able to participate in the INSEN annual meeting again, since it does not coincide with my family holiday this year. And it’s good that I am here since I was asked to act as vice chair for the INSEN network, which I’m honored to do! We already had a running […]

Workflow for Neutron Activation Analysis of archaeological ceramics @ ATI

Analyzing ceramics by NAA Today I received the news that my article (Sterba 2018) on my current workflow to analyze archaeological ceramics with Neutron Activation Analysis was put online. In this paper I describe the workflow I apply to archaeological ceramics from taking the samples in the first place, either on site or in the […]

Across Borders Project – with Video!

The Across Borders Project has been great fun and quite an interesting experience. Fun, because the project partners, at least the ones I was in direct contact with, were great fun to work and exciting to exchange thoughts with. It was also very interesting to my work because I learned a lot about the chemistry […]

The elements of coffee

This year around, we had a really great group of students working in the Course on Laboratory Excercises in Radiochemistry. That’s the reason we decided that, instead of doing the regular Neutron Activation Analysis example where we determine the elemental composition of ground coffee, we would go for something slightly more fun: With much skill, […]

Long-term environmental radioactive contamination of Europe due to the Chernobyl accident – Results of the Joint Danube Survey 2013

The social media team of Applied Radiation and Isotopes has selected our study on radionuclides in the sediments of the Danube river to be made available for three months as an open access publication! The study was made possible by the Joint Danube Survey (2013) where a total of 68 samples were collected from both […]

A short visit to Greece

This last few days I was able to flee the approaching bad weather in Vienna and travel to Greece. My first stop was at Aegina, an island only 70 minutes by ferry from Athens. There I visited the famous archeological excavation at Aegina Kolonna and was allowed to take samples from to pieces of pumice found there […]