The Purdue Rare Isotope Measurement Laboratory (PRIME Lab) is a national, multi-user facility dedicated to the measurement of cosmogenic radionuclides using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). This award will provide management and operations support for this facility. Significant geologic processes occur over a wide variety of time-scales. Catastrophic changes, large debris flows or floods, occur over short time-scales but other changes, such as long-term erosion of landscape or glacial cycles occur over longer time-scales, thousands to millions of years. These changes nonetheless play a dominant role in landscape evolution and directly impact the welfare of human populations world-wide. Measuring the rates of these processes and reconstructing a chronology for them is a challenge and geoscientists employ a number of tools to extract this information from the geologic archive. Cosmic-ray produced nuclides, especially those measured by accelerator mass spectrometry, are now routinely used to obtain chronologies and determine erosion rates for significant geologic processes. In the last decade these nuclides have been used to reconstruct glacial chronologies, which in turn provides a record of past climates. They have also been used to show linkages between tectonic activity and erosion rates. The pursuit of these studies has involved PhD students and researchers from dozens of universities within the US. At PRIME Lab they not only learn how to perform the physical and chemical preparation of samples, but they also participate in the measurement of their samples on the PRIME Lab accelerator mass spectrometry system. The interaction between students, faculty, and professional staff at PRIME facilitates interaction with geologists, chemists, and physicists, providing a near unique opportunity to expand the educational opportunity beyond the focus of the research projects.
With continued NSF support, PRIME Lab will continue utilizing the unique capabilities of a larger accelerator for the benefit of the geoscience community. Given the limited number of multi-isotope facilities in the US, we anticipate growth in the number of measurements (and sample preparation) required by the geoscience community. In addition to more routine measurements, we are the only laboratory in the US positioned to advance the state-of-the-art using a gas-filled-magnet. We have already demonstrated the efficacy of the instrumentation for 10Be, 26Al, and 36Cl, especially 26Al. For the next five years, PRIME Lab will continue to advance the application of cosmogenic nuclides in the geosciences through increased productivity of routinely measured nuclides and by the development of new measurement technologies and applications harnessing these advances.
