The 14C AMS facility at LABEC, Florence

Abstract The main facility of the new INFN laboratory in Florence (LABEC, LAboratorio di tecniche nucleari per i BEni Culturali) is a 3 MV Tandetron accelerator, manufactured by High Voltage Engineering Europe, used for both Accelerator Mass Spectrometry and Ion Beam Analysis (IBA) measurements. The AMS beam line is equipped with a 59-sample sputter ion source and a sequential injector – on the low energy side – and a spectrometer composed of a 115° analysing magnet and a 65° electrostatic analyser – on the high energy side. A sample preparation laboratory has been installed for radiocarbon measurements. Combustion of pre-treated organic samples is performed using an elemental analyser; four parallel graphitisation reactors are available for CO 2 reduction. In this paper, the performance of the whole system is presented: 14 C values of chemistry blanks correspond to radiocarbon ages in the order of 50,000 years BP; measurements of 14 C concentration in different standard reference materials demonstrate good accuracy.