TIMS Working Group Meeting
July 28th , 2005

Present-
Tony Appelhans-Idaho National Laboratory
Lang Farmer-University of Colorado, Boulder
Gary Hiefjte-Indiana University
Brian Marshall-U.S. Geological Survey, Denver

Mission Statement-
As a first order of business, the group attempted to define what the purpose of a TIMS consortium is. Those present agreed that our main intent was to use a consortium approach to promote instrument and technique developments that could increase our ability to make “ultra” high precision elemental isotope analyses, for increasingly smaller sample sizes. With this goal, then the “consortium” need not be organized solely around TIMS, but could be inclusive of any method of determining high precision isotope ratios. A second main goal of this consortium would be to establish an education component, where students, particularly from the earth sciences, could gain a more detailed knowledge of mass spectrometry, analytical chemistry and electronics. The consortium could also serve as a means of establishing the instrumentation advances required by the geoscience community, and to communicate these needs both to potential funding agencies and to the private sector. Finally, the consortium needs to be international in scope.

The following represents a draft mission statement:
The High Precision Isotope Ratio (HIPIR) Consortium is an international group of earth scientists and analytical chemists working jointly to advance ultra-high precision elemental isotope ratio determinations, via improved instrumentation, analytical techniques, and information dissemination in inorganic mass spectrometry.

Consortium Activities
There was enthusiasm amongst the working group to maintain the consortium in as informal a confederation as possible, but still maintain an effective presence in promoting advances in high precision elemental isotope ratio determinations within the academic community and in communicating these needs to funding agencies and the private sector. With this in mind, some initial activities proposed for the consortium are as follows:

Publications
Review article(s) of the state of the art in isotope ratio instrumentation and analytical techniques could be generated and published in mainstream technical journals (ie. “reviews” issue of Analytical Chemistry). Articles in “newspapers” of professional organizations (e.g. EOS, from American Geophysical Union; C&EN of the American Chemical Society) advertising the goals and activities of the consortium could also be produced.

Web Presence
A web presence for the consortium is critical, and numerous possibilities for web page content were discussed. One critical need is for increased communication between analytical chemists/instrument designers and earth scientists. The web page could be used to publish profiles of the research activities and contact information of analytical chemists and earth scientists, so as to better match up scientists interested in high precision isotope ratio measurements but working in different disciplines.

The web page could also include postings of lecture materials in mass spectrometry, electronics and instrumentation in general, workshop and meeting announcements, recent papers of interest in both chemical, physical and earth science journals as well as other informational material. The latter could include a mass spectrometry “dictionary” defining specific terms and performance, or a “how to buy a mass spectrometer” document in which information is disseminated on how prospective buyers can spec out new commercial instruments.

Education
An important role of the consortium should be information dissemination and education. The working group considered education activities as potentially having the greatest immediate impact on the earth science community and we should move forward with planning of such as quickly as possible. A number of education activities were envisioned, starting with a posting on the consortium website of a fifty minute Powerpoint talk on mass spectrometry in general and state-of-the-art issues in high precision isotope mass spectrometry. This presentation could be downloaded by any interested party. Sponsoring a short course (s) on such topics as mass spectrometric methods, solid state electronics, detector systems, etc. was also a high priority activity, and organizing such a course should be one of the main short term activities of the consortium. Other suggestions included sponsoring a “hands-on” internship(s) in mass spectrometry for current earth science graduate students. Both internships and short courses would benefit from the availability of older instruments that could be disassembled (and presumably reassembled) as part of the course exercises.

A number of avenues for organizing and funding these short courses were discussed, including the possibility of approaching commercial mass spectrometer manufacturers to help sponsor such workshops. The commercial companies might also be enticed to present “best paper” awards to graduate students, with the prize being, for example, free short course, or training course, registration.

Workshops
Workshops remain a useful method of encouraging interdisciplinary communication, particularly between earth scientists and instrumentalists, and the consortium should work to fund and stage additional workshops, similar to the “Reinvigorating TIMS” workshop held November, 2004. A two year interval between workshops seems reasonable and several potential topics for the next workshop were discussed. One possibility would be a workshop on “Limiting Factors for High Precision Isotope Ratio Determinations” that would include the TIMS, SIMS and MC-ICPMS communities. Other topics might target advances in detection systems, or ionization methods, or assess in detail advantages and disadvantages of specific instrument systems (e.g. multicollector ICP-MS vs. TIMS). These workshops would also serve as general meetings of the consortium.

Working Group
There was discussion regarding the nature of the consortium working group. Certainly the working group must be maintained as a viable entity through yearly meetings, but the membership should clearly rotate on a regular basis. At any given time, the membership should consist of earth scientists, from both academic and government settings, as well as analytical chemists and instrumentalists. Also though no formal term limits were discussed, a maximum term of 3 years seems reasonable, but with membership being evaluated on a yearly basis to reflect the evolution of the consortium activities.

Action Items
Based on the working group’s discussion the following action items were developed:

• By end of 2005
  1. Purchase of domain name and establish basic website
  2. Establish working group membership for 2006
  3. Search for potential authors of website lecture material and for review article(s)
• Early 2006
  1. Organize a second working group meeting to develop short course activities and to discuss funding and organization of second workshop, possible for Fall 2006.