NIGeL

NIGeL is a NWO-Large Infrastructure funded national research facility for geochemical and isotopic analysis serving the Earth & Planetary Science, Archaeology, Forensic and Cultural Heritage research communities within and beyond the Netherlands. NIGeL is located within the Earth Science Department at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. NIGeL is established in purpose-built laboratories at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, but is a national facility to conduct trace element, radiogenic and (non-)traditional stable isotope analyses. It offers innovative research possibilities for isotopic and elemental analysis of geological, archaeological, forensic, cultural heritage, environmental and synthetic materials. NIGeL facilitates the analysis of markedly smaller sample sizes and a broad range of isotopic systems for both bulk- and in-situ analysis. The facility was established based on four key driving factors: Recent technical developments in detector technology that allows a 10-fold decrease in samples size opening up ground-breaking research fields across a wide range of disciplines. The development of new collision-cell and MS/MS technology that offers the potential to conduct in situ analysis in compositionally complex samples. The fabrication of a state-of-the-art clean laboratory designed to increase sample throughput and reduce contamination, enabling numerous new research questions that require analyses of smaller samples. An urgent need to expand capacity to meet the rapidly increasing demand for isotopic data in archaeology, cultural heritage, environmental sciences, and forensics.

Isotope ratio mass spectrometry (irms)

Geochemistry

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