Distilled Water?

Distillation may not be the best term for this. We are basically doing a reduction of water volume by using a drying oven. This will remove water through vaporization leaving behind a smaller volume of water with the original particulates. This reduction increases our sensitivity since we can provide a higher concentration within our maranelli beaker. It was hypothesized early on that this reduction may actually remove the isotopes of interest from our samples, but we tested a sample with a 5 to 1 reduction and the same sample without reduction and we saw, within statistical error, no difference in the measured activity concentration in the initial sample. This shows that our process maintained the isotopes within the volume during the reduction.