Quantitative study of contamination effects in AMS 14C sample processing

When using AMS for radiocarbon work, it is important to characterize the contaminating carbon which is added to the sample during its preparation for the AMS measurement. This allows the effects of the contamination to be correctly subtracted out, and also helps to guide efforts to reduce the contamination. We performed a series of measurements on blanks and standards of varying sizes to quantify the contamination arising in the PRIME Lab's radiocarbon sample processing laboratory. We present our results, along with a discussion of the analysis used to extract properties of the contaminants from the data. Our analysis allows for contamination added at two different stages in the sample preparation, and does not assume that the contaminants are modern