DEC 01, 1977
Stimulated largely by recent developments in archaeology and the environmental sciences, physical scientists have been giving a good deal of attention to the practical problem of getting better carbon‐14 dates. One particular area of renewed interest is the use of a mass spectrometer to separate the radioactive from other carbon isotopes. The content could then be measured directly, rather than by counting decays as is done now. The difficulty has been that conventional mass spectrometers are not sufficiently sensitive to detect the small percentages of present in typical samples: The / ratio ranges from in contemporary biological samples down to about in samples older than 70 000 years or so.
© 1977. American Institute of Physics
