Status Report on the Sample Preparation Laboratory for Radiocarbon Dating at the New Bucharest Roams Center

Abstract

The accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) center at Horia Hulubei National Institute for R&D in Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest, is based on the latest-generation 1 MV Tandetron® accelerator, produced by High Voltage Engineering Europa (HVEE), The Netherlands. The AMS center became fully functional at the start of 2013, and at the end of 2015 the laboratory established the RoAMS international code and it was added to the list of AMS laboratories maintained by Radiocarbon journal. An important aspect in the establishment of a new AMS laboratory is the declaration and documentation of the adopted protocols and to demonstrate the reliability and reproducibility of the measurements in comparison to internationally recognized reference materials. In this paper, we present the dating results on the Sixth International Radiocarbon Intercomparison (SIRI) samples that were pretreated, graphitized, and measured in our laboratory. The newly developed sample preparation laboratory can handle sample materials as (1) organic materials, (2) wood, (3) bones, and (4) carbonates. The results of our measurements are in very good agreement with the SIRI consensus values and confirm the reliability of our sample preparation laboratory and also the good performance of the HVEE AMS system. The blank levels for the SIRI materials are 0.277±0.045/0.333±0.046 percent modern carbon (pMC) for wood samples, 0.441±0.038 pMC for bone collagen, and 0.239±0.030 pMC for carbonate materials, considering an average mass of 1 mg sample graphite.

Semi‐automatic combustion of environmental and biological samples on Oxidizer M307 and equivalents: New solutions for background reduction

“…First attempt of Background lowering on OXIDIZER M307/Quantulus 1220 workflow : In this first experiment, the influence of old cellulose added into the “basket + cap” system, made of modern pulp, was determined. A series of 10 different old wood samples of known radiocarbon ages, previously pretreated according to BABAB procedure to purify the cellulose, were used (Table ) . Since the main difference in “basket + cap” system radionuclide inventory is given by radiocarbon, this first stage of the study is performed only for carbon‐14 determinations.…”

“…A series of 10 different old wood samples of known radiocarbon ages, previously pretreated according to BABAB procedure to purify the cellulose, were used (Table 1). 36 Since the main difference in "basket + cap" system radionuclide inventory is given by radiocarbon, this first stage of the study is performed only for carbon-14 determinations.…”

Late Holocene droughts and cave ice harvesting by Ancestral Puebloans

“…Seven twig charcoal fragments and filtered organic matter recovered from the ice core and a sample of charred pine needles (CF-1) were sent to the RoAMS Laboratory at the National Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering in Romania, for radiocarbon dating using a 1 MV Tandetron accelerator mass spectrometer 45 . Although charcoal was recovered from depths of 7.5 and 33 cm in the ice core, not enough graphite was produced to generate ages.…”

Intervalidation of Dendrochronology and14C Dating on a 700-yr Tree-Ring Sequence Originating from the Eastern Carpathians

“…The AMS 14 C dating method of wood samples requires cellulose extraction and purification for reliable and reproducible results. The chemical pretreatment followed the standard (base-acidbase-acid-bleaching) BABAB laboratory protocol (Sava et al 2018), while for the graphitization stage we used an AGE III automated system, manufactured by Ionplus AG, (Wacker et al 2010a). All the samples were normalized against NIST 4990C-Oxalic Acid II (NIST 1983) modern reference standard and background corrected using SIRI Sample L (pMC avg = 0.28 ± 0.06; Scott et al 2017).…”