Conveners
Accelerators for Cultural Heritage
- Alejandro Castilla (Jefferson Lab)
Cultural heritage objects serve as invaluable links to our past, offering profound insights into human history, art, and civilizations. Preserving and understanding these artifacts requires non-invasive analytical methods capable of revealing their material composition and degradation mechanisms. Ion beam analysis (IBA) has emerged as a crucial field, bridging science and cultural heritage...
Nuclear analytical techniques (NAT), and in particular accelerator-based techniques such as Ion Beam Analysis (IBA) for elemental and molecular analysis and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) for radiocarbon dating, have long been applied to cultural heritage forensics, involving the characterization, authentication, and dating of artefacts. Nevertheless, there is still a considerable gap...
As part of research by a Conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, of a 17th century Tibetan sculpture, details of the internals of the sculpture were needed to be determined non-destructively. The sculpture, a Buddhist deity known as “Vajrabhairava with consort Vajravetali” measured approximately 27” x 18” x 12”. The sculpture was presumed hollow and made of several parts from copper...
Non-destructive analysis techniques became an important approach for the characterization of cultural heritage and conservation science. In this study, for the first time, Synchrotron-based X-ray Fluorescence (SRXRF) analysis, at the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME), was utilized to examine and analyze three Byzantine plaster figurines...
