Pankaj Sharma, Michael Bourgeois, David Elmore, Xiuzeng Ma, Tom Miller, Ken Mueller, Frank Rickey, Paul Simms, PRIME Lab, Department of Physics, Purdue University

Michael Lipschutz, Department of Chemistry, Purdue University

Darryl Granger, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University

Stephan Vogt, IAEA, Department of Nuclear Sciences and Applications, A-2444 Seibersdorf, AUSTRIA

PREPRINT AMS-8

PRIME Lab is a dedicated research and service facility for AMS that provides the scientific community with timely, reliable and high quality chemical processing (~600 samples/year) and AMS measurements (~3000 samples/year) of ¹⁰Be, ¹⁴C, ²⁶Al, ³⁶Cl, ⁴¹Ca and ¹²⁹I. The AMS system is based on an upgraded FN (7MV) tandem accelerator that has recently been modified to improve performance. The precision is 1% for ¹⁴C and it is 3-5% for the other nuclides for radioisotope/stable isotope ratios at the 10^-12 levels. System background for ¹⁰Be, ¹⁴C, ²⁶Al, ³⁶Cl and ⁴¹Ca is 1-5 x 10^-15 while for ¹²⁹I the natural abundance limits it to 40x10^-15. Research is being carried out in Earth, planetary, and biomedical sciences. Geoscience applications include determination of exposure ages of glacial moraines, volcanic eruptions, river terraces, and fault scarps. Burial histories of sand are being determined to decipher the timing of human expansion and climatic history. Environmental applications are tracing the release of radioactivity from nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, water tracing, and neutron dosimetry. The applications using meteoric nuclides are oil field brines, sediment subduction, radiocarbon dating, and groundwater ³⁶Cl mapping. Radionuclide concentrations are also determined in meteorites and tekites for deciphering space and terrestrial exposure histories.