Facilities — Isotoparium

The Isotoparium is located in the North Mudd building, home of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. The laboratory comprises (i) ~700 sq feet of Class 100* trace-metal laboratory space equipped with seven fully-exhausted vertical laminar flow workstations for low-level contamination trace element chemistry, and (ii) ~500 sq feet of HEPA-filtered and environmentally controlled space designated for mass spectrometry.

*less than one hundred 0.5 micron-sized particles per cubic meter of air (ISO 5)

Clean Lab

Class 100 trace metal laboratory equipped with: (1) Millipore® Milli-Q IQ7000 water purifying system capable of producing ultra-pure 18.2 MΩ water; (2) one metal-free fully exhausted hood dedicated to clean acid distillation; (3) three Savillex® DST-1000 sub-boiling distillation assemblies for the production of ultra-pure concentrated HNO3, HCl and HF; (4) six metal-free, ULPA-filtered and fully-exhausted polypropylene vertical laminar flow workstations providing a micro-environment better than Class 10 for trace-metal chemistry; (5) one Mettler® XS225DU digital analytical balance.

**Mo hood (left), cleaning island (center) and Nd hood (right) (unspiked lab).**

**Milli-Q water purification system (unpsiked lab).**

**Precision balance (to 10mg, left) and analytical balance (to 0.01 mg), with anti-static U-bar (weighing room).**

**Oven, centrifuge, precision balance and orbital shaker (weighing room).**

**Sub-boiling acid distillation and Teflon leaning (Unpsiked lab).**

**Seawater samples evaporating in preparation for chemistry (spiked lab).**

**Micromill (left) and microscope, for precision sampling (weighing room).**

**Angrites meteorites after crushing, ready for digestion.**

**Solvent cabinet and clean-lab fridges dedicated to isotopic standards (center) and spikes (right) (weighing room).**

**iRMM-524a Fe foil in MQ water, ready to be dissolved (left), and actively digesting in 500 ml of 2.5M HNO3 (right).**

**Custom-made pressurized 30-cm columns with drop counter for Nd purification (unspiked lab).**

**Sample pass-through (weighing room to spiked lab).**

Instruments

MC-ICP-MS - Neptune Plus (ThermoFisher) Multi-Collector Inductively-Coupled-Plasma Mass-Spectrometer (MC-ICP-MS) for high-precision measurements of isotopic ratios.

MC-ICP-MS/MS - Neoma (ThermoFisher) MC-ICP-MS with pre-mass filter and collision/reaction cell (CRC) for high-precision measurements of isotopic ratios.

TIMS - A ThermoFinnigan Multi-Collector Thermal-Ionization-Mass-Spectrometer, for high-precision measurements of isotopic ratios.

iCAP RQ - Collision-cell Quadrupole ICP-MS (ThermoFisher), for high-precision measurement of elemental concentrations.

NWRfemto - A femtosecond laser ablation system from New Wave Research (257 nm femtosecond laser configuration). Can be coupled to either MC-ICP-MS or the iCAP RQ, or both at the same time.

**The back end of the Neptune, settling in the Isotoparium.**

**A rare view of the Neptune's analyzer gate (internal component), seen here holding the back-end vacuum.**

**iCap door opened revealing the plasma interface.**

**Neptune Plus MC-ICP-MS (#309), installed!**

**Changing the TIMS graphite liner cups.**

**ICP-MS iCAP RQ for concentration work.**

**NWRfemto laser beam alignment tests.**

**The half-ton magnet carefully approaching the Neptune's flight tube.**

**Dr. Papanastassiou's TIMS (#27) transplant (from JPL), first to move into the Isotoparium.**

**NWRfemto Laser: #10 in the world, #2 in the US.**

Lab construction

Some behind-the-scenes photos showing what it took to go from a regular to the dust-free environment.