LILBID Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer
Fig. 1 shows the principle of a LILBID experiment.
You either have a liquid beam of small diameter
or a train of droplets flying through vacuum.
The liquid beam or the flying droplets are intercepted
by a pulsed infrared laser operating at the absorption
wavelength of the liquid.
When the liquid explodes, biological molecules contained
within the liquid are set free usually with a small number
of charges and some solvent molecules on it.
They are detected in a time-of-flight mass spectrometer.
Fig. 2 shows the schematics of such a mass spectrometer.
As in fig. 1, a liquid beam or a train of droplets is intercepted by
a laser that vaporates the solvent and liberates biological molecules
and noncovalently bound complexes. These are accelerated into the
mass spectrometer. The fragmentation laser can be used e.g. to probe
the nature of bonds in noncovalently bound complexes. The gridless
reflector and detector are used to detect the ions with high senitivity and high mass
resolution.
Fig. 3 shows a possible extension of such a LILBID mass spectrometer.
Liquid droplets are shot into an ion guide, where they are vaporized
by an infrared laser. The ions created are transported by the ion guide
into the extraction optics of the mass spectrometer. Producing the ions
within the ion guide allows all the standard interactions done within
ion guides such as cooling and heating.
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