Department of Earth System Science

A new 14C accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) laboratory for carbon cycle studies has been established at the University of California, Irvine. The 0.5 MV AMS system was installed in mid-2002 and has operated routinely since

October of that year. This paper briefly describes the spectrometer and summarizes lessons learned during the first year of operation. In the process of setting up the system, we identified and largely suppressed a previously unreported radiocarbon

AMS background: charge exchange tails from 14N beams derived from nitrogen-containing molecular ions produced near the entrance of the accelerator.