Time Of Flight Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (TOF-AMS) of Large Molecular Ions at MeV Energies

The feasibility of using TANDEM electrostatic particle accelerators as a linear TOF analyzer for molecular ions (TOF-AMS) is reported in this work. A specific ion source, based on a soft ionization technique commonly used in modern mass spectrometry, employing a pulsed UV-laser to desorb molecular ions from the solid state, was built for that purpose. The current instrumentation has been used to analyze samples of CsI and C60 using the whole accelerator as a linear Time of Flight spectrometer. From the point of view of basic studies on molecular collisions, the apparatus has some unique features that allow the simultaneous discrimination of various fragmentation and charge exchange channels for different types of molecular ions. From the point of view of applied studies, the TOF-AMS technique may be able to overcome some difficulties encountered in mass spectrometry of biomolecules.