Article in the PLOS ONE Journal

Human hair absorbs biomolecules from the body during its growth. This can act as a fingerprint to determine an individual’s intake of a substance, which can be useful in forensic studies. Using the MeV-SIMS technique,  the cocaine content in hair samples has been analyzed on our accelerator. The focused 5.8 MeV Cl-35 beam traveled longitudinally along the chemically intact hair structure. High chemical sensitivity, non-destructive characterization and high resolution of the method enable extremely accurate determination of the time dimension of narcotic intake. The detected  50 mm wide intensity peaks correspond to a metabolic time of ca 3 hours.

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