Absolute dating radiocarbon dating. The development of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating, which allows a date to be obtained from a very small sample, has been very useful in this regard. Other radiometric dating techniques are available for earlier periods. One of the most widely used is potassium–argon dating (K–Ar dating). Potassium-40 is a radioactive isotope of potassium that decays into argon-40. The half-life of potassium-40 is 1.3 billion years, far longer than that of carbon-14, allowing much older samples to be dated. Potassium is common in rocks and minerals, allowing many samples of geochronological or archeological interest to be dated. Argon,
Radioactive tracer Tc in autoradiography and nuclear medicine, including single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), positron emission tomography (PET) and scintigraphy. The urea breath test for helicobacter pylori commonly used a dose of C labeled urea to detect h. pylori infection. If the labeled urea was metabolized by h. pylori in the stomach, the patient's breath would contain labeled carbon dioxide. In recent years, the use of substances enriched in the non-radioactive isotope C has become the preferred method, avoiding patient exposure to radioactivity. In hydraulic fracturing, radioactive tracer isotopes are injected with hydraulic fracturing fluid to determine the injection profile and