Back from MARC…

Instead of watching the falling snow outside my window right now, I’d much rather remember last April when I got to spend a week on beautiful Hawaii participating in the MARC XI conference. It was great to see old friends again and meet new people. There was quite a large group of students there, too, […]

Sterba and Sterba

For quite a while now I was hoping that at some point I’d be able to publish a paper together with my father, but up to now our respective fields of work were too divergent. Some time ago, he asked me for help on figuring out some multi-dimensional integrals, because he believed that a measure […]

Workflow for Neutron Activation Analysis of archaeological ceramics @ ATI

Analyzing ceramics by NAA Today I received the news that my article ​(Sterba 2018)​ on my current workflow to analyze archaeological ceramics with Neutron Activation Analysis was put online. In this paper I describe the workflow I apply to archaeological ceramics from taking the samples in the first place, either on site or in the […]

Long-term environmental radioactive contamination of Europe due to the Chernobyl accident – Results of the Joint Danube Survey 2013

The social media team of Applied Radiation and Isotopes has selected our study on radionuclides in the sediments of the Danube river to be made available for three months as an open access publication! The study was made possible by the Joint Danube Survey (2013) where a total of 68 samples were collected from both […]

Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Ceramic Analysis

I had the honor to be invited to contribute a chapter to the Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Ceramic Analysis by the editor Alice Hunt of the Center of Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia. Only recently she informed me that the book is being advertised here and here. Right now production is set […]

Nuclear Activation AMS

[bibshow file=all.bib] Recently, I have been cooperating with the VERA laboratory on dedecting minute amounts of Chlorine in steel [bibcite key=Winkler2015]. Usually, the detection of Cl is easily done by regular Neutron Activation Analysis (see e.g. [bibcite key=Steinhauser2006c,Steinhauser2006b]), in this case the very small amount of chlorine in combination with the interference from the matrix […]

Anton Wallner featured on 2Physics

[bibshow file=all.bib] Anton Wallner, from VERA, Austria as well as Dept of Nuclear Physics, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (insert appropriate joke about the existence of Kangaroos here) was recently featured on 2Physics with our work on the half-life of 60Fe [bibcite key=Hall2013]. It’s always good to see that colleagues get the attention that they […]

RHX-Dating revisited…

[bibshow file=all.bib] Our latest publication on RHX-Dating is online! Rehydroxylation-Dating is based on the observation that fired clay grows heavier and larger over time. This gain in mass is associated with water that is slowly moved very deeply into the material in a process called diffusion. The water is bound not as water molecule but […]

Settling the Half-Life of Fe-60

A very nice publication I had the honor to contribute to was just published. It even got some additional attention by being picked as the Editor’s Spotlight and being featured in Physicsworld! I’m very happy with this one and enjoyed the cooperation a lot. The measurements were somewhat tedious, but the final outcome was worth […]