A novel electrospray setup was found effective for direct analysis of fullerene solutions by electrospray (ES) mass spectrometry. The electrospray capillary needle used for the analysis is equipped with a thin metal (copper, platinum or stainless steel) wire installed inside the capillary. The wire tip protrudes slightly from the capillary end. In this configuration the high electrical field formed by the wire tip stimulates a specific electrospray mode with a fine spray originating from the tip. The correlation of the acquired mass spectra with the magnified view of the spray at the capillary tip was investigated. The effective formation of fullerene ions in both negative and positive ion modes was observed in mass spectra only in the specific case of the electrospray originating from the wire tip. The fullerene di-anions observed in the negative ES mass spectra provide evidence for the electrochemical nature of this process occurring at the ES capillary tip. Observation of fullerene ions in mass spectra obtained using the suggested electrospray arrangement is assumed to be a consequence of the fine spray originating from the sharp metal wire tip. In this case the liquid/metal interface is near the Taylor cone apex.

An ion rotating excitation mode of operation of a segmented gas-filled radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ) ion guide for a high-resolution orthogonal time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometer is described. It is shown theoretically, by computer simulation and experimentally, that ion rotating excitation in a gas-filled RFQ has several advantages over other types of ion oscillation excitation. The main advantages are an approximately twofold increase in average ion kinetic energy for the same maximal deviation from the RFQ axis and therefore an increase of about this factor of average internal excitation energy of ions, and the extended mass range of fragment ions that can be observed. The new method of ion decomposition by ion rotation around the axis of an RFQ ion guide was experimentally implemented and tested using a home-built`SIN-COS' generator to supply the excitation voltage. This generator enables control of phase shift and amplitude of excitation voltages applied to quadrupole rods smoothly from the data acquisition program running on a PC. Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.As a result of the orthogonal injection of ions, 1,2 the coupling of electrospray ionization (ESI) to time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOFMS) has now become an attractive technique, especially for structural investigation of biomolecules. Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) capabilities in this case are very important and, within the last few years, the literature on ESI-TOFMS has begun to focus on MS/MS techniques with hybrid instruments. Commonly, fragmentation of ions in these systems is achieved by traditional methods for collision-induced dissociation (CID). 3±5 However, a collision cell which is often also a radio-frequency ion guide provides the intrinsic possibility of inducing of collision-induced fragmentation of selected ions by resonant excitation of ion oscillations at the auxiliary angular frequency:where q M is the Mathieu parameter, o is the fundamental angular radio frequency (RF) of the voltage applied to the quadrupole ion guide (collision cell), q is the ion charge, m is its mass, V rf is RF-amplitude, and r 0 is the radius of the radiofrequency quadrupole (RFQ), i.e. the minimal distance from axis to rods. These oscillations may be considered on average as harmonic due to the quadratic dependence of averaged effective RFQ potential (or ion`potential' energy) on the distance r av from the RFQ axis:where t v is the ion velocity relaxation time, and F is the maximal field strength at the considered point. The last approximate equality is valid for low enough gas pressure in the RFQ (when ot v ) 1) and in the vicinity of its axis. The motion of an ion in the RF-only quadrupole ion guide can be excited through the application of an auxiliary voltage on one set of pole pairs (dipolar excitation) or on two sets of these (quadrupolar excitation). In the presence of a background neutral gas, the excited ion motion will result in an increase in the number and energy of collisions. As kinetic energy is transferred to ion inter...

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A new effective and robust approach to the detection of incompletely resolved peaks, and evaluation of their parameters in high-resolution time-of-flight mass spectra for time-to-digital convertor (TDC) data acquisition mode, is described. The method is based on fast construction of a smoothed continuous curve that approximates the initial data (transformed to a constant relative width of time intervals for ion counting) with respect to precision of measurements. The first derivative of this curve is used for correction of skewness of the peak shape as far as possible. A contribution of the second derivative is subtracted from the smoothed curve for better resolution of partially resolved peaks. The comparison of local maxima of this resulting final curve with those for the initial smoothed curve allows reliable detection of the peaks and to test whether or not they are spoiled by overlapping. Ion counting performed by TDC gives an opportunity to estimate standard deviations of peak locations and their intensities. These values proved to be close to theoretically minimal standard deviations for these parameters for single fully resolved peaks. Thus, estimates of the main parameters of mass peaks by the described method are close to statistically efficient estimators for these parameters.

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