Reston Cosmogenic Nuclide (RECON) Laboratory

The Reston Cosmogenic Nuclide (RECON) Lab is a facility dedicated to the extraction of cosmic-ray-produced isotopes from geologic samples. These isotopes are useful for dating exposure of rocks, quantifying basin-averaged erosion rates, and dating burial of rocks in caves or under thick surficial deposits. Cosmogenic nuclides are widely applied across the geosciences, playing critical roles in the fields of landscape evolution, geohazard studies, and paleoclimatology.

RECON Lab specializes in the extraction of 26Al and 10Be, two extremely rare isotopes that are produced in quartz via cosmic radiation. We sample deposits in the field, isolate quartz using conventional mineral separation techniques (i.e., crushing, milling, magnetic separation, and heavy liquids), characterize their purity using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES), and perform chemistry to separate aluminum and beryllium for isotopic measurement via accelerator mass spectrometry at the Purdue Rare Isotope Measurement (PRIME) Lab.