Speaker
Description
Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) is the most sensitive analytical method to measure long-lived radionuclides. Several AMS system has been recently established in Europe, however, most of them exclusively detecting carbon-14. At Dresden a 6 MV tandem accelerator is used for AMS since 2011: The DREAMS (DREsden AMS) facility [1-3] is part of the Ion Beam Center, a large-scale user facility, where users apply for measurements via a proposal system.
Radionuclides, which are routinely measured at DREAMS, are 10Be, 26Al, 36Cl, 41Ca, and 129I. We recently also focussed on nuclides with shorter half-lives such as 7Be or 44Ti. The detection limits are generally several orders of magnitude better than any other mass spectrometry or decay counting method. AMS needs smaller sample sizes and measurements are finished within a few minutes to hours; though after performing chemical separation of the radionuclide from the sample matrix (ice, snow, rain, ground water, marine sediments, soil, meteorites, deep-sea nodules, lava, rocks).
DREAMS users apply AMS to most diverse interdisciplinary projects. Prominent examples are the proof and dating of multiple supernovae during the last 10 Ma [4] and dating of a boulder from a rock fall triggered by a medieval Earthquake in the Nepal Himalaya [5].
Ref.: [1] Akhmadaliev et al., NIMB 294 (2013) 5. [2] Rugel et al., NIMB 370 (2016) 94. [3] www.dresden-ams.de. [4] Wallner et al., Nature 532 (2016) 69. [5] Schwanghart et al., Science 351 (2016) 147.
