Wiktionary
n. (context physics English) A form of mass spectrometry in which ions are accelerated to extraordinarily high kinetic energy before mass analysis.
Wikipedia
Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) differs from other forms of mass spectrometry in that it accelerates ions to extraordinarily high kinetic energies before mass analysis. The special strength of AMS among the mass spectrometric methods is its power to separate a rare isotope from an abundant neighboring mass ("abundance sensitivity", e.g. C from C). The method suppresses molecular isobars completely and in many cases can separate atomic isobars (e.g. N from C) also. This makes possible the detection of naturally occurring, long-lived radio-isotopes such as Be, Cl, Al and C. Their typical isotopic abundance ranges from 10 to 10. AMS can outperform the competing technique of decay counting for all isotopes where the half-life is long enough.
Usage examples of "accelerator mass spectrometry".
Evolutionary Anthropology 3:174-84 (1995), discusses the revisionist view, based on accelerator mass spectrometry dating of very small plant samples, that the origins of agriculture in the Americas were much more recent than previously believed.
Increasingly today, archaeologists are circumventing this problem by a new technique termed accelerator mass spectrometry, which permits radiocarbon dating of tiny samples and thus lets one directly date a single small seed, small bone, or other food residue.