By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
Tucked in a corner of the Riverbend research campus on College Station Road, UGA’s Center for Applied Isotope Studies has for two decades served quietly as an analytical laboratory.
With the recent installation of a $1.25 million accelerator mass spectrometer, things stand to get a lot busier around CAIS.
“This technology brings a new capability to what we can do as scientists,” says John Noakes, the professor of geology who serves as director of CAIS. “We can now get very precise measurements from very small samples. It’s tomorrow’s technology today.”
CAIS is a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to research in nuclear analytical methods and systems technology. The CAIS staff includes chemists, physicists, geologists and marine scientists, along with several research and adjunct faculty members.
The spectrometer will be available to scientists both on and off the UGA campus, and it will dramatically increase over older methods the speed for counting the number of carbon-14 atoms in a chemical or biological sample. It consists of a particle accelerator in tandem with an ion source, large magnets and a detector, and it measures radioactive isotope carbon-14 and the stable isotopes carbon-12 and carbon-13.
Only four other such machines are located in the United States, none in the Southeast. Though there are dozens of uses for the accelerator mass spectrometer, its primary function will initially be carbon-14 dating for applied research in environmental pollutants and drug therapy, as well as aspects of elemental pathways in biological systems.
“There are numerous areas in which it can be used, including geology, hydrology, oceanography, biology and more,” says Mark Roberts, senior research scientist and associate director of CAIS. “Biologists, for instance, use carbon-14 as a tracer tag to follow chemicals through systems. The AMS is a thousand-fold more sensitive than other kind of tracing-tag methods.”
Carbon-14 has for decades been used to date artifacts, since it decays at a regular rate. C-14 dating has been used by archeologists, paleontologists and others, and the technique has been applied to such artifacts as the Shroud of Turin, which some claim as the burial cloth of Jesus.
Many new uses have been developed in the past two decades, however, and the much faster AMS technology is now used in studies of everything from global climate change and environmental monitoring to food and animal science.
“We will as always be generating our own research program and participating jointly with other researchers on campus as co-principal investigators on projects,” says Noakes. “But we will also operate as a for-pay-service facility in AMS analysis for off-campus organizations.”
Roberts, who came to UGA from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, offers examples of unusual uses of the technology, beyond the standard testing.
“We actually worked with the Secret Service one time in examining carbon-14 in paper on which another country was apparently printing counterfeit money,” says Roberts.
The technology was also once used when government agents found about 20 sets of deer antlers in a suspected poacher’s garage. The AMS system was able to date when the antlers had been taken to help agents in the case.
The technology could have a side benefit, since less radioactive material will be used to prepare samples, which will ease disposal problems for the samples.
Installed in November, UGA’s machine is now on line, and CAIS is getting the word out to scientists at UGA--and beyond.
“This is a new breed of machine that nobody knew would even work until about two years ago,” says Roberts. “With this technology, we want to get people thinking how they can use it in their research.” |
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