A Simple Way to Upgrade a Compact Radiocarbon AMS Facility for 10 Be

A simple way to upgrade the Peking University 500kV NEC radiocarbon facility (CAMS) for 10 Be measurements is presented. In a first phase, a silicon nitride foil as passive boron degrader was mounted in front of the electrostatic deflector near the focal plane of 10 Be. The Si detector at the end of the beam line was replaced with a high-resolution ΔE-E res gas ionization chamber. In addition, a Faraday cup for the measurement of 9 Be 1+ was installed. Tests with this arrangement showed promising results: a 10 Be/ 9 Be background level of 3.4 × 10 –14 and an overall transmission for 10 Be of 2.2% were obtained. Measurements of standards showed very good stability and reproducibility. In the next step, it is planned to add a second magnet to reduce the background and to partly compensate losses due to energy and angular straggling in the degrader foil by the energy and angular refocusing effect of a magnetic sector field. With this final arrangement, a performance with 10 Be/ 9 Be background levels at 10 −15 and 10 Be overall transmission of 6–7% can be expected. The design proposed in this paper has the advantage that the modifications can be realized in a rather inexpensive way and that the measurement performance for 14 C will not be affected

Detector · Faraday cup · Ion beam · Magnet · Nuclear engineering · Nuclear physics · Optics · Physics · Reproducibility · Upgrade · Chemistry · Computer Science · Engineering · Materials Science · Nuclear Physics and Applications · Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies · X-ray Spectroscopy and Fluorescence Analysis

• Low-energy 14C AMS in Poznań Radiocarbon Laboratory, Poland

  Open Access•Tomasz Goslar, Justyna Czernik et al.•Nuclear Instruments and Methods…•2004

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