High resolution method for using time-of-flight mass spectrometers with orthogonal ion injection
AssigneeBruker Daltonik GmbH
InventorJochen Franzen
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Abstract
The invention relates to a time-of-flight mass spectrometer in which a fine beam of ions is injected orthogonally into a fast pulser that pulses the ions from the fine ion beam into the spectrometer's drift region for precise determination of mass. The invention consists in increasing the duty cycle of the ions through the use of a high pulser frequency, recording the data cyclically at the same frequency, and assigning slow ions that are only measured in one of the subsequent cycles to the correct initiating pulse through the form of their lines or line patterns.
Claims7
A method for the precise mass determination of ions in a time-of-flight mass spectrometer that uses orthogonal ion injection and has a pulser, an ion detector and a measuring device for measuring ion currents at the detector, the method comprising:
- (a) measuring, with the measuring device, ion current signals at the detector cyclically without regard to the passage time of the ions and accumulates the results in a store;
- (b) pulsing out ions in the pulser synchronously with the measuring cycles;
- (c) determining an association of the measured ion current signals with ion pulses using at least one of the shape of the ion current signal, the shape of the ion current signal group, and the velocity of the ions;
- and
- (d) determining, using said association of ion current signals to said ion pulses, flight times and specific masses of the ions.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.