Status of the PSI/ETH compact AMS facility

• DOI: 10.1016/j.nimb.2004.04.024
• Publication Date: 2004-05-29T14:09:38Z
• Authors: M Stocker; R Bertschinger; M Döbeli; M Grajcar; S Jacob; J Scheer; M Suter; H.-A Synal
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 01 natural sciences; 7. Clean energy

Abstract The compact AMS facility at PSI/ETH Zurich, primarily designed to measure radiocarbon in charge state 1+, has been upgraded for measurements of 10Be, 26Al, 41Ca, 129I and Pu isotopes. Additional apertures have been placed in the focal planes of charge state 3+ and new Faraday cups have been installed to monitor the corresponding stable isotopes. A high-resolution time-of-flight detector has also been built in order to identify sources of background. For final detection a gas ionisation chamber with a thin Si3N4 entrance window has been successfully tested. Charge state distributions, scattering losses and machine transmission for the newly investigated elements have been determined. Total transmissions are comparable to the values obtained at the Zurich EN-Tandem AMS facility. In all cases detection limits are given by background levels which are about 10−12 for 10Be, 41Ca and 129I, 7 × 10−14 for 26Al and 106 atoms for Pu.