AMS 14C Measurements At Labec on Viri (Fifth International Radiocarbon Inter-Comparison) Samples

Since May 2004, the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) beam line of the new 3 MV Tandetron accelerator of LABEC laboratory in Florence has been in operation. The line, equipped with the necessary hardware for 14C, 10Be, 26Al and 129I measurements, has been used only for radiocarbon measurements so far. We have been involved both in measurements on test samples and in dating applications in collaboration with Universities and other Institutions. After a brief description of the AMS beam line, we report on a set of radiocarbon measurements performed on samples of the Fifth International Radiocarbon Inter-comparison (VIRI) campaign. This campaign, coordinated by the Department of Statistics of the University of Glasgow, basically involves all the radiocarbon laboratories worldwide, both AMS and conventional beta-counting ones. Our data have been here compared to the statistical distributions of all collected data (average values and standard deviations).