Time of flight mass spectrometer

A non-transitory computer readable medium having a computer readable program code embodied therein, the computer readable program code adapted to be executed to implement a method of determining the time of flight of ions in a sample, the method comprising:

• providing a calibration sample comprising ions of different mass-to-charge ratios to a time-of-flight mass analyzer and acquiring data until an ion with a greatest time of flight is incident on an ion detector;
• determining a peak width for each of the ion species after summing several time-of-flight measurements of the calibration sample to provide calibration data of peak width versus flight time;
• determining a data acquisition time, the data acquisition time being a predetermined fraction of the greatest time of flight;
• providing ions from a continuous beam of a sample to a time-of-flight mass analyzer at pulse intervals having a duration equal to the predetermined non-unity fraction of the greatest flight time;
• measuring a peak width and a flight time value for each of the ion species in the sample after summing the data acquired during several pulse intervals;
• correcting the measured flight time values according to a correlation of measured peak width values with the calibration data of peak width versus flight time;
• and
• converting the corrected flight time values into the mass-to-charge ratios.