Carbon dating, personalized medicine, and more fields advance using accelerator mass spectrometry

01/06/2015 - 00:00

By Kelen Tuttle -

Step into the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on any given day, and you may see researchers tracking the dynamics of the Earth’s carbon cycle, searching for signatures of nuclear fuel reprocessing or determining the age of remains from the Chicago Police Department’s cold case files.

These vastly different projects have one thing in common: They all use accelerators to measure levels of carbon-14 and other isotopes.

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