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

Clean Lab blueprint.

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).

Spiked lab.

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

 
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MC-ICP-MS - Neptune Plus (ThermoFisher) Multi-Collector Inductively-Coupled-Plasma Mass-Spectrometer (MC-ICP-MS) 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.

Unpacking the NWRfemto laser-head.

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.

The Neptune and iCap components, freshly received at the dock and on their way to the Isotoparium.

Isotoparium's air handling unit (bottom) and giant exhaust fans (top) (roof of North Mudd building).

Insider's view of the Isotoparium's fiberglass reinforced plastic exhaust pipes and exhaust fans (roof of North Mudd building).

Craning the various air handling unit components onto the roof (North Mudd, Caltech).