Equipment

The facility consists of six rooms, three equipped with standard lighting conditions (“white rooms”) and three utilizing dim, filtered amber-light conditions (“darkrooms”). The white rooms are comprised of two wet laboratories and one meeting room with hot desks for visitors and students. A specially-designed revolving door provides access to three dark rooms: a storage room, a wet laboratory, and a machine room. Each dark room is equipped with proprietary lighting solutions (Frouin et al., in review).

Each room is equipped with the following state-of-the-art instrumentation. The first white room wet laboratory hosts a laser diffraction particle size analyzer (Mastersizer2000), a solar simulator (Honle SOL2), and six microscopes (stereo and polarizing). The second white room wet laboratory hosts the low background high-resolution Broad Energy Germanium Detector (BE3830) equipped with electrical cooling (CRYO-PULSE 5 PLUS) from Mirion Technologies (Canberra) to record low levels of radiation in sediment. This instrumentation allows the laboratory to conduct high-resolution gamma spectrometry measurements on sediment samples for accurate and precise dose rate determination. This equipment does not require any routine maintenance and is fully accessible to SBU academics and students upon request for material analysis. The dark room wet laboratory is dedicated to sample preparation and is equipped with all the facilities necessary to extract quartz and feldspar grains, including three fume hoods for chemical treatment air extraction. The machine room hosts two Risø OSL/TL luminescence readers to stimulate and detect the light emissions from minerals at multi- and single-grain scales and perform XRF measurements.