Carbon-14: direct detection at natural concentrations.
The (14)C atoms naturally present in a piece of 19th-century wood have been detected directly by means of a tandem Van de Graaff accelerator used as a high-energy mass spectrometer. The (14)C ions were easily resolved from interfering ions with the use of a DeltaE-E detector telescope (this telescope consists of a pair of detectors; one of them measures the specific ionization, DeltaE, and the sum of the signals from both detectors gives the total energy for each ion, ET). The technique offers a number of practical advantages.
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