Carbon-14: Direct Detection at Natural Concentrations

Abstract

The ¹⁴C atoms naturally present in a piece of 19th-century wood have been detected directly by means of a tandem Van de Graaff accelerator used as a high-energy mass spectrometer. The ¹⁴C ions were easily resolved from interfering ions with the use of a ΔE-E detector telescope (this telescope consists of a pair of detectors; one of them measures the specific ionization, ΔE, and the sum of the signals from both detectors gives the total energy for each ion, E_T). The technique offers a number of practical advantages.