Towards an Australian Atom-Trap Trace Analysis (ATTA) facility

Abstract

Atom-Trap Trace-Analysis (ATTA) is a technique aimed at a measuring the relative (in comparison to the common isotope) abundance of exceedingly rare noble gas radio-isotopes , for the purposes of dating water, ice and other materials that contain trapped gases. These isotopes exist with an extremely low natural abundance and require measurement capability down to parts in 10 17 . The noble gas dating protocol is similar to that of radio-carbon dating but, the three isotopes together, allow dating of materials in complementary ranges to that possible with the radiocarbon technique. In a facility jointly created by CSIRO, Griffith and Adelaide Universities, we use laser guidance, cooling and trapping to perform isotopic separation using the isotopic dependence of atomic energy levels. The facility is currently undergoing construction but has been shown to be able to produce metastable Ne and Ar, which can then be laser cooled and trapped. When combined with the existing gas separation facility at the CSIRO Waite facility, which efficiently extracts pure noble gases from that are dissolved in water or ice samples, we should be in a position to start measuring the age of real-world samples in the early part of 2020. In addition, to describing the current state of construction, we will also discuss two more efficient approaches for creating metastable atoms that can reduce samples size and avoid unwanted cross-contamination between samples.The atom-trap trace analysis (ATTA) technique [1] for measuring noble-gas radio-isotope abundance requires that the noble-gas sample is first excited into the metastable state, from which laser-cooling is readily achievable. A picture of

Aplicações de trítio na determinação de tempos de residência no ciclo hidrológico

“…Sendo insignificantes as contribuições tecnogênicas para a geração do 81 Kr, o traçador oferece a vantagem de que os parâmetros de entrada nos sistemas são constantes. Porém, um enorme obstáculo atualmente colocado para a utilização da metodologia ATTA é que estes equipamentos são de altíssimo custo e disponíveis em apenas poucos países no mundo (LIGHT et al 2019), e ainda se encontram em processo de contínua evolução (JIANG et al 2017).…”