PRIME lab AMS performance, upgrades and research applications

The Purdue Rare Isotope Measurement Laboratory (PRIME Lab) is a dedicated research and service facility for AMS that provides the scientific community with timely, reliable and high quality chemical processing (similar to 600 samples/year) and AMS measurements (similar to 3000 samples/year) of Be-10,C-14, Al-26, Cl-36, Ca-41 and I-129. The AMS system is based on an upgraded FN (7 MV) tandem accelerator that has recently been modified to improve performance. The precision is 1% for C-14 and it is 3-5% for the other nuclides for radioisotope/stable isotope ratios at the 10(-12) levels. System background for Be-10, C-14, Al-26, Cl-36 and Ca-41 is 1-10 x 10(-15) while for I-129 the natural abundance limits it to 20 x 10(-15) Research is being carried out in Earth, planetary, and biomedical sciences. Geoscience applications include determination of exposure ages of glacial moraines, volcanic eruptions, river terraces, and fault scarps. Burial histories of sand are being determined to decipher the timing of human expansion and climatic history. Environmental applications are tracing the release of radioactivity from nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, water tracing, and neutron dosimetry. The applications using meteoric nuclides are oil field brines, sediment subduction, radiocarbon dating, and groundwater Cl-36 mapping. Radionuclide concentrations are also determined in meteorites and tektites for deciphering space and terrestrial exposure histories. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.