Counting statistics and ion interval density in AMS.

Abstract

Confidence in the precisions of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and decay measurements must be comparable for the application of the radiocarbon calibration to age determinations using both technologies. We confirmed the random nature of the temporal distribution of (super 14) C ions in an AMS spectrometer for a number of sample counting rates and properties of the sputtering process. The temporal distribution of ion counts was also measured to confirm the applicability of traditional counting statistics.