Recent Development in Mass Spectrometry

Recently, the progress of mass spectrometry has been mainly achieved with the development of new soft ionization techniques, such as secondary ion mass spectrometry, plasma desorption, fast atom bombardment, laser desorption, multiphoton ionization, and so on, and with the development of chromatography/mass spectrometry such as gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry and so on. It has been demonstrated that nonvolatile large molecules can be ionized by these soft ionization methods, which are reviewed. The combination techniques of gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry are very powerful methods for mixture analysis and are applied to various fields. These are also reviewed here.