Since late 1970s,AMS has become a very important dating and tracing tool in a number of scientific fields due to its advantages of high sensitivity, small sample size and short measuring time. AMS facility at Peking university was established and put into operation in 1993 under the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. It is based on an EN tandem accelerator and mainly used for the measurements of long-lived cosmogenic nuclides ¹⁴C、¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al. The AMS facility is located at the Institute of Heavy Ion Physics, School of physics. ¹⁴C、¹⁰Be sample preparations have been developed at the Lab of Archaeometry and Conservation Science, School of Archaeology and Museology, and the Department

During the first several years, the accuracy of ¹⁴C measurement was not very satisfactory. An upgrade of PKUAMS has been carried out for the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project since 1996. A NEC MC-SNICS ion source has been installed and the injection system has been reconstructed. The computer control of beam line has been realized with Group 3 ControlNet and a new data acquisition system has been developed. The alignment and vacuum of beam line were also improved. Upgraded system has been commissioned since 1998. An accuracy of better than 0.5% can be reached for ¹⁴C samples with the age younger than 5000a based on the upgrade of facility and the methodology study of ¹⁴C analyzing.

To meet the increasing requirement of ¹⁴C analysis, Peking University decided to buy a compact AMS system based on a Model 1.5SDH-1 Pelletron accelerator from NEC. It was installed in September, 2004 and then used for ¹⁴C routine measurements. The accuracy of this system is better than 0.4% and the machine background is lower than 0.03pMC. EN tandem based AMS system will be used for ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al measurements.

The applications of the PKUAMS laboratory are mainly in the fields of Archaeology, earth science, environmental science and bio-medical science. The users of PKUAMS are from China and also overseas.