The Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator, VERA, is a particle accelerator. [1] It is operated by the University of Vienna and is dedicated to Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS). It started operation in 1995.
The system is a 3-MV Pelletron type tandem accelerator, designed to accelerate protons or heavy ions.
A trace radioisotope is a radioisotope that occurs naturally in trace amounts. Generally speaking, trace radioisotopes have half-lives that are short in comparison with the age of the Earth, since primordial nuclides tend to occur in larger than trace amounts. Trace radioisotopes are therefore present only because they are continually produced on Earth by natural processes. Natural processes which produce trace radioisotopes include cosmic ray bombardment of stable nuclides, ordinary alpha and beta decay of the long-lived heavy nuclides, thorium-232, uranium-238, and uranium-235, spontaneous fission of uranium-238, and nuclear transmutation reactions induced by natural radioactivity, such as the production of plutonium-239 and uranium-236 from neutron capture by natural uranium.
Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien was a German physicist who, in 1893, used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien's displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody at any temperature from the emission at any one reference temperature.
Mass spectrometry (MS) is an analytical technique that is used to measure the mass-to-charge ratio of ions. The results are presented as a mass spectrum, a plot of intensity as a function of the mass-to-charge ratio. Mass spectrometry is used in many different fields and is applied to pure samples as well as complex mixtures.
Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) is a form of mass spectrometry that accelerates ions to extraordinarily high kinetic energies before mass analysis. The special strength of AMS among the mass spectrometric methods is its power to separate a rare isotope from an abundant neighboring mass. The method suppresses molecular isobars completely and in many cases can separate atomic isobars also. This makes possible the detection of naturally occurring, long-lived radio-isotopes such as 10Be, 36Cl, 26Al and 14C. Their typical isotopic abundance ranges from 10−12 to 10−18. AMS can outperform the competing technique of decay counting for all isotopes where the half-life is long enough. Other advantages of AMS include its short measuring time as well as its ability to detect atoms in extremely small samples.
In experimental physics, a quadrupole ion trap or paul trap is a type of ion trap that uses dynamic electric fields to trap charged particles. They are also called radio frequency (RF) traps or Paul traps in honor of Wolfgang Paul, who invented the device and shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for this work. It is used as a component of a mass spectrometer or a trapped ion quantum computer.
Microdosing, or micro-dosing, is a technique for studying the behaviour of drugs in humans through the administration of doses so low ("sub-therapeutic") they are unlikely to produce whole-body effects, but high enough to allow the cellular response to be studied. This is called a "Phase 0 study" and is usually conducted before clinical Phase I to predict whether a drug is viable for the next phase of testing. Human microdosing aims to reduce the resources spent on non-viable drugs and the amount of testing done on animals.
Isotope-ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) is a specialization of mass spectrometry, in which mass spectrometric methods are used to measure the relative abundance of isotopes in a given sample.
Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar is an autonomous research institution of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Government of India. The institute was founded by Professor Bidhu Bhusan Das, who was Director of Public Instruction, Odisha, at that time. Das set up the institute in 1972, supported by the Government of Odisha under the patronage of Odisha's education minister Banamali Patnaik, and chose Dr. Trilochan Pradhan as its first director, when the Institute started theoretical research programs in the various branches of physics. Other notable physicists in the institute's early days included Prof. T. P. Das, of SUNY, Albany, New York, USA and Prof. Jagdish Mohanty of IIT Kanpur and Australian National University, Canberra. In 1981, the Institute moved to its present campus near Chandrasekharpur, Bhubaneswar. It was taken over by the Department of Atomic Energy, India on 25 March 1985 and started functioning as an autonomous body.
Josef Mattauch was a nuclear physicist and chemist. He was known for the development of the Mattauch-Herzog double-focusing mass spectrometer, for his work on the investigation of isotopic abundances using mass spectrometry, and the determination of atomic weights. Much of his career was spent at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.
Alexander Alexeyevich Makarov, is a Russian physicist who led the team that developed the Orbitrap, a type of mass spectrometer, and received the 2008 American Society for Mass Spectrometry Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry Award for this development. In November 2013 he was appointed to Professor by Special Appointment of High Resolution Mass Spectrometry at the Department of Chemistry and the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
The Institute for Radium Research is an Austrian research institute associated with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. The Institute's researchers won multiple Nobel Prizes. Due to the gradual change of interests, "nuclear physics" was added to the institute's name in 1956. Since 2004, it is called the Stefan-Meyer-Institute for subatomic physics.
Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory focuses on the study of cosmogenic isotopes, and in particular the study of radiocarbon, or Carbon-14. As a laboratory, part of its aim is to function as a research center, training center, and general community resource. Its stated mission is conducting original research in cosmogenic isotopes. The AMS laboratory was established in 1981 at the University of Arizona.
Neutron scattering is a spectroscopic method of measuring the atomic and magnetic motions of atoms. Inelastic neutron scattering observes the change in the energy of the neutron as it scatters from a sample and can be used to probe a wide variety of different physical phenomena such as the motions of atoms, the rotational modes of molecules, sound modes and molecular vibrations, recoil in quantum fluids, magnetic and quantum excitations or even electronic transitions. Since its discovery, neutron spectroscopy has also become useful in medicine as it has been applied to radiation protection and radiation therapy. Although neutron spectroscopy is capable of operating on many orders of magnitude of electron volts, current and recent research has focused on expanding neutron scattering to higher energy levels.
Amnon Marinov was an Israeli physicist. He undertook research into nuclear structures, nuclear reactions, superheavy elements and long-lived nuclear isomers.
Walter Kutschera is an Austrian physicist.
Albert Edward "Ted" Litherland is a nuclear physicist, known for his pioneering work in accelerator mass spectroscopy (AMS).
The André E. Lalonde Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory is an accelerator mass spectrometry research facility at the University of Ottawa in Canada. It is currently the only facility of its type in Canada. It is named after former University of Ottawa Faculty of Science dean André E. Lalonde, who died of cancer in 2012.