- Also called:
- mass spectroscopy
Development
The particle accelerators used in nuclear physics can be viewed as mass spectrometers of rather distorted forms, but the three principal elements—the ion source, analyzer, and detector—are always present. L.W. Alvarez and Robert Cornog of the United States first used an accelerator as a mass spectrometer in 1939 when they employed a cyclotron to demonstrate that helium-3 (3He) was stable rather than hydrogen-3 (3H), an important question in nuclear physics at the time. They also showed that helium-3 was a constituent of natural helium. Their method was the same as that described above for the omegatron except that a full-sized cyclotron was used, and it easily distinguished the two isotopes. The method was not employed again for nearly 40 years; however, it has found application in measuring cosmogenic isotopes, the radioisotopes produced by cosmic rays incident on the Earth or planetary objects. These isotopes are exceedingly rare, having abundances on the order of one million millionth of the corresponding terrestrial element, which is an isotopic ratio far beyond the capabilities of normal mass spectrometers. If the half-life of a cosmogenic isotope is relatively short, such as beryllium-7 (7Be; 53 days) or carbon-14 (14C; 5,730 years), its concentration in a sample can be determined by radioactive counting; but if the half-life is long, such as beryllium-10 (10Be; 1.5 million years) or chlorine-36 (36Cl; 0.3 million years), such a course is ineffective. The advantage of the large, high-energy accelerator mass spectrometer is the great detector selectivity that results from ions having 1,000 times more energy than any previously available machine could provide. Conventional mass spectrometers have difficulty measuring abundances less than one hundred-thousandth of the reference isotope, because interfering ions are scattered into the analyzer location where the low-abundance isotope is to be sought. Extremes of high vacuum and antiscattering precautions can improve this by a factor of 10 but not the factor of 100 million that is required. An accelerator suffers from this defect to an even greater degree, and large quantities of “trash” ions are found at the expected analyzer location of the cosmogenic isotope. The ability of certain kinds of nuclear particle detectors to identify the relevant ion unambiguously enables the accelerator mass spectrometer to overcome this shortcoming and function as a powerful analytical tool.
Operation of the tandem electrostatic accelerator
The tandem electrostatic accelerator (see particle accelerator: Van de Graaff generators) quickly displaced all other machines for this purpose, primarily because its ion source, the cesium sputter source described above, is located near ground potential and is easily accessible for changing samples. The ions must be negative, but this does not prove to be a handicap as they are easily and efficiently produced. Before entering the high-voltage tube, the ions are mass-analyzed so that only the beam emerging at the mass location of the cosmogenic isotope enters the accelerator; the intense reference isotope beam is often measured at this location without entering the accelerator at all. The cosmogenic isotope beam is attracted to the high-voltage terminal of the machine where collisions with gas or a thin carbon foil or both strip various numbers of electrons, thereby leaving the subject isotope with a distribution of multiple positive charge states that are repelled by the positively charged terminal. All molecular ions are broken up. The emerging beam then passes through analyzing fields of which a high dispersion magnet is the principal part. Upon leaving the analyzer, the beam enters the detector. Each ion is examined individually in a manner that allows its identity to be established. The most common way of doing this is by using a combination of two particle detectors: one detector measures the rate at which the particle loses energy when passing a given length of matter, while the other simultaneously measures the total energy of the particle. The counts are stored in the bins of a two-dimensional computer array, the coordinates of which are given by the amplitudes of the signals from the two detectors. The numerous “trash” ions take on values from the two detectors that fill regions of the data array but generally do not overlap the well-defined region occupied by the subject ion. Each kind of isotope requires a specially designed detector system with various additional analyzing fields and, in some cases, even the use of time-of-flight techniques. A schematic diagram of an accelerator mass spectrometer is shown in .
Applications
The accelerator method has opened lines of investigation that had previously been inaccessible. A strong motivation for the inventors was the improvement of radiocarbon dating. Scientists are now able to make age determinations from much smaller samples and to make them much more rapidly than by radioactive counting, but carbon-14 proved to be a considerably more difficult problem for instrumental development than the other cosmogenic isotopes. The method was applied almost immediately to analyses involving beryllium-10 and chlorine-36, with aluminum-26 (26Al), calcium-41 (41Ca), and iodine-129 (129I) following soon after; notable achievements resulted from all five. Cosmic rays striking the atmosphere are a strong source of beryllium-10, carbon-14, and chlorine-36, which are deposited in rain and snow, whence their migration may be followed. A question concerning the origin of the lavas of island-arc volcanoes, which had been disputed since the general acceptance of the plate tectonic theory of the Earth’s structure, was settled from the observation of beryllium-10 in these lavas. The presence of beryllium-10 proved that deep-ocean sediment, rich in the isotope, had been subducted (i.e., carried on the surface of a descending tectonic plate beneath another such plate) and some of the sediment incorporated into the magma. The first application of chlorine-36 was the study of the migration of ancient groundwater. Later improvements in instrumental techniques added iodine-129 as a needed tracer for this challenging problem. Nuclear bomb tests at oceanic sites produced huge amounts of chlorine-36 that were injected into the atmosphere. For a few years rain contained this isotope at a level up to 1,000 times higher than the cosmogenic level. This yielded a tracer with a well-defined time of origin that will be useful long into the future for following the course of such water in soils and aquifers (water-bearing layers of rock). The four lightest of these isotopes have proved useful in determining the ages and irradiation histories of meteorites and lunar samples. There have been extensive studies of beryllium-10 in cores of polar ice and ocean sediments that give unique information about the intensity of cosmic rays over the past few million years.
John Herbert Beynon Louis Brown