¹⁴C MICROSAMPLE ANALYSIS WITH ECHoMICADAS FACILITIES: CURRENT STATE OF PLAY

ABSTRACT In 2015, a new accelerator mass spectrometry facility (AMS), the ECHoMICADAS (Environnement, Climat, Homme, MIni CArbon DAting System), was installed in the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE). Equipped with a hybrid source, it allows the analysis of solid or gas samples for 14 C measurement. Here, we summarize the equipment surrounding the Gas Interface System (GIS), namely the elemental analyzer (EA), the carbonate handling system (CHS2) and the ampoule cracker. We describe our model of sample contamination, taking into account the cross and the constant contaminations, and then describe how these contaminations were handled in the data processing. Both contaminant corrections are applied before the phases of blank subtraction and standard normalization, making it possible to use the standard, blank and sample ratios without contaminant during these phases. We finally present our results on normalization standards (N=118), blanks (N=125) and reference materials (N=117) for different measurement protocols and for sample masses between 3 and 300 µgC.