Correction of instrument biases during high-precision U-Th chronology on Nu instrument MC-ICP-MS   Email     Print   PDF

Gideon Henderson, Andrew Mason, Alex Thomas

Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford (gideonh@earth.ox.ac.uk)

            We will give a brief (and hopefully not too desperately geeky – we know the audience isn’t full of mass-spec heads) description of the behaviour of the Nu instrument for U-Th analysis.  In particular, we’ll address the issues of using measured U mass bias to correct for Th mass bias:  Does it work?  Is there collector bias?  What are the limitations?  And we’ll address the question of Faraday to Ion-Counter gain:  How constant with time and beam size?  Is there a mass or element bias?  There have been recent publications providing performance information on such issues for the Thermo Neptune – the other widely used instrument for U-Th chronology.  This talk will provide such a technical over-view for the Nu.