PRIME lab AMS performance, upgrades and research applications

The Purdue Rare Isotope Measurement Laboratory (PRIME Lab) is a dedicated r esearch 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 upgrade d FN (7 MV) tandem accelerator that has recently been modified to improve p erformance. The precision is 1% for C-14 and it is 3-5% for the other nucli des for radioisotope/stable isotope ratios at the 10(-12) levels. System ba ckground for Be-10, C-14, Al-26, Cl-36 and Ca-41 is 1-10 x 10(-15) while fo r I-129 the natural abundance limits it to 20 x 10(-15) Research is being c arried out in Earth, planetary, and biomedical sciences. Geoscience applica tions include determination of exposure ages of glacial moraines, volcanic eruptions, river terraces, and fault scarps. Burial histories of sand are b eing determined to decipher the timing of human expansion and climatic hist ory. Environmental applications are tracing the release of radioactivity fr om nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, water tracing, and neutron dosimetry. The applications using meteoric nuclides are oil field brines, sediment sub duction, radiocarbon dating, and groundwater Cl-36 mapping. Radionuclide co ncentrations are also determined in meteorites and tektites for deciphering space and terrestrial exposure histories. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. A ll rights reserved.