This award provides partial funding for the acquisition of a specialized cesium sputter ion source to be installed in the accelerator mass spectrometry facility at Purdue University. The ion source will be capable of producing high-intensity beams of ions of the elements beryllium, carbon, aluminum, chlorine, calcium and iodine from target samples loaded in a 60-sample cassette. The facility is based on a model FN tandem Van de Graff accelerator and, with the installation of the ion source, will be capable of measuring extremely small concentrations of the cosmogenic isotopes (such as carbon-14, for example) of the above elements. These isotopes have proven useful as tracers and for determining the ages of a wide variety of natural samples in which they are incorporated at very low concentration levels.
