"Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) was first developed in 1977 as a way to directly measure the ratio of radiocarbon (carbon-14) to stable carbon (carbon-12) in organic material and thus to determine when the organism died using samples of a milligram or less. For reasons that are not completely understood the technique is presently limited to samples that are 60,000 years old or younger. Even for samples, e.g. carbon from oil, natural gas (methane) or coal, that are millions of years old this limit applies. It thus prevents the dating of very old samples. It also prevents the selection of sources of natural gas for use in the production of very large volume liquid scintillation detectors for the measurement of low energy neutrinos. The measurement of these and higher energy neutrinos from the sun is presently an important scientific endeavor. One would like to find sources of methane that have carbon-14 to stable carbon ratios corresponding to 110,000 years, or, perhaps, even to 150,000 years from which scintillation liquid can be manufactured to allow the measurement of the lowest energy solar neutrinos. The proposed research has the aim of measuring such ages of methane and other organic material by AMS."
