Continuous-flow accelerator mass spectrometry for radiocarbon analysis

Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) is a widely used technique for radiocarbon dating of archaeological or environmental samples that are very small or very old (up to 50,000 years before present). Because of the method's extreme sensitivity, AMS can also serve as an environmental tracer and supplements conventional nuclear counting techniques for monitoring ¹⁴C emissions from operating nuclear power plants and waste repositories. The utility of present AMS systems is limited by the complex sample preparation process required. Carbon from combusted artefacts must be incorporated into a solid metallic target from which a negative ion beam is produced and accelerated to MeV energies by an accelerator for subsequent analysis. This paper will describe a novel technique being developed by the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NOSAMS) Laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for the production of negative carbon ion beams directly from a continuously flowing sample gas stream, eliminating the requirement for a solid target. A key component of the new technique is a microwave-driven, gaseous-feed ion source originally developed at Chalk River Laboratories for the very different requirements of a high current proton linear accelerator. A version of this ion source is now being adapted to serve as an injector for a dedicated AMS accelerator facility at NOSAMS. The paper begins with a review of the fundamentals of radiocarbon dating. Experiments carried out at NOSAMS with a prototype of the microwave ion source are described, including measurements of sample utilization efficiency and sample "memory" effect. A new version of the microwave ion source, optimized for AMS, is also described. The report concludes with some predictions of new research opportunities that will become accessible to the technique of continuous-flow AMS.