Abstract
The LABEC laboratory, the INFN ion beam laboratory of nuclear techniques for environment and cultural heritage, located in the Scientific and Technological Campus of the University of Florence in Sesto Fiorentino, started its operational activities in 2004, after INFN decided in 2001 to provide our applied nuclear physics group with a large laboratory dedicated to applications of accelerator-related analytical techniques, based on a new 3 MV Tandetron accelerator. The new accelerator greatly improved the performance of existing Ion Beam Analysis (IBA) applications (for which we were using since the 1980s an old single-ended Van de Graaff accelerator) and in addition allowed to start a novel activity of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), in particular for 14C dating. Switching between IBA and AMS operation became very easy and fast, which allowed us high flexibility in programming the activities, mainly focused on studies of cultural heritage and atmospheric aerosol composition, but including also applications to biology, geology, material science and forensics, ion implantation, tests of radiation damage to components, detector performance tests and low-energy nuclear physics. This paper describes the facilities presently available in the LABEC laboratory, their technical features and some success stories of recent applications.
Highlights
The LABEC laboratory, the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) ion beam laboratory of nuclear techniques for environment and cultural heritage, located in the Scientific and Technological Campus of the University of Florence in Sesto Fiorentino, started its operational activities in 2004, after INFN decided in 2001 to provide our applied nuclear physics group with a large laboratory dedicated to applications of accelerator-related analytical techniques, based on a new 3 MV Tandetron accelerator
The new accelerator greatly improved the performance of existing Ion Beam Analysis (IBA) applications and in addition allowed to start a novel activity of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), in particular for 14C dating
The very first applications we performed dealt with air pollution investigations, for which we developed a home-made sampler for the collection of aerosols with one hour resolution and we could obtain a time-resolved compositional analysis of the aerosol collected on the filters [3]
Summary
LABEC had already been actively working since the mid-1980s in the field of acceleratorbased applications to various fields. This Van de Graaff (KS3000) had been built in 1955 to be the injector of the electrosynchrotron in the INFN National Laboratories of Frascati (Rome): when the electrosynchrotron ended to be used in the late 1960s, the VdG injector was transferred to Florence, completely refurbished and converted by the local group into a positive ion machine (KN3000) As such, it started a second life and continued to be used in basic researches for more than ten years, performing nuclear spectroscopy studies and an important high-precision measurement, with months of data-taking, searching for possible effects of parity mixing in nuclei [1, 2]. As regards its involvement in environmental research infrastructures, LABEC is currently part of the European Centre for Aerosol Calibration, ECAC (www.actris-ecac.eu), of the Aerosols, Clouds and Trace gases Research Infrastructure (ACTRIS), hosting the European reference centre for the elemental characterization of atmospheric aerosols
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