Friday, 9 September 2005 - 4:20 PM

This presentation is part of: AMS in Low Dose Bioscience Workshop

A new concept for a biomedical AMS system

Hans-Arno Synal, Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), c/o Institute for Particle Physics, ETH Hönggerberg, Zürich, Switzerland and Martin Suter, Institute of Particle Physics, ETH Zurich, ETH Hoenggerberg, HPK H31, Schafmattstrasse 20, Zurich, 8093, Switzerland.

The advent of the latest generation of radiocarbon AMS spectrometers has opened new possibilities for the design of biomedical AMS instruments. We will present a new design of such a dedicated AMS system. It will be a simplified version of our MICADAS device, which has successfully demonstrated its radiocarbon dating capabilities. The new biomedical system will operate in a DC mode and only mass 14 ions will be injected into the acceleration unit, which will be a vacuum insulated differentially pump high voltage platform hosting the stripper assembly. High voltage is provided from commercial 200 kV power supply. At the high-energy end, ion separation will be performed by a non-energy dispersive combination of a 90° magnet and a 90° spherical electrostatic deflector. Finally, particles will be identified in gas ionization detector. To normalize the 14C ions detected we will use a current measurement of the 12C- ion beam extracted from the source. To monitor intensity molecules, 13C ions, fragments from injected 13CH molecules will be measured in a Faraday after the HE magnet. This concept makes possible a very small overall size for the instrument (2.6 x 2.3 m2). The ion source will be adopted to the requirements of biomedical AMS. In particular, it will be equipped with a high throughput sample changer. This device will have to magazine load locks which make a continuous source operation possible.

See more of AMS in Low Dose Bioscience Workshop
See more of The 10th International Conference on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (September 5-10, 2005)