Current 14C Measurements with the University of Washington FN Tandem Accelerator

Abstract
Our accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) system shows a one-to-one relationship between sample 14C concentrations determined by AMS - and by β-counting. Measurements of unknown samples against a standard indicate that 14C concentration measurements to better than 2% can be made. For a 30-second data collection interval in a typical run of 100 intervals, the variability of the beam injected into the accelerator is ca 2%, that of the machine transmission is ca 4%, and counting statistics give 4.7% standard deviation for a sample of 80% of modern carbon.