It has been used almost exclusively to measure carbon-14. The greatest advantage of radiocarbon dating by AMS is the ability routinely to measure samples containing 1 mg or less of elemental carbon, while previous methods have required nearly 1000 times that amount.

When was AMS invented?

Introduction. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) was developed for analyzing 14C in environmental and archeological specimens in the 1970s (although it was first demonstrated in the 1930s). It is now principally used to measure only a handful of isotopes, although it is feasible to apply it to many additional analytes