Accelerators for Society

From Symmetry Magazine, 6 January 2015

Step into the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on any given day, and you may see researchers tracking the dynamics of the Earth’s carbon cycle, searching for signatures of nuclear fuel reprocessing or determining the age of remains from the Chicago Police Department’s cold case files.

These vastly different projects have one thing in common: They all use accelerators to measure levels of carbon-14 and other isotopes.

CAMS is one of several dozen labs worldwide that conduct accelerator mass spectrometry, or AMS. The technique is less time-consuming and requires a much smaller sample size than traditional carbon dating. Read more >>

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