Electronic data acquisition and operational control system for time‐of‐flight sputtered neutral mass spectrometer

Abstract

A new electric data acquisition and operational control system was developed for time‐of‐flight sputtered neutral mass spectrometry (TOF‐SNMS). The system is designed for high‐speed data acquisition, data processing, and data streaming. The developed system is constructed on an NI‐PXI platform and provides timing clocks for the TOF‐SNMS operation. The system performs data processing of noise suppression and ion counting while acquiring TOF mass spectrum for 13‐microsecond length at sampling rate of 3 GS/s for every 1 millisecond. In addition, the system acquires and records TOF mass spectrum of 60‐microsecond length at sampling rate of 3 GS/s for every 1 millisecond without data processing. The system detects single ion signals from accumulated TOF mass spectrum of 107 times and counts up to 10 ions accurately from a single event of TOF mass spectrum.

Development of electrostatic‐induced charge detector for multiturn time‐of‐flight mass spectrometer

“…A schematic illustrating the data acquisition system for the electrostatic-induced charge detection is shown in Figure 2. This system resembles that of the data acquisition system reported by Bajo et al 13 The pulse signals from the A250CF preamplifier are converted The noise characteristics of the iCD system are evaluated by a blank spectrum, which is produced by the same data acquisition procedure as the normal infiTOF operation 9 without the extraction of ions from the EI source. The baseline of the iCD spectrum is modulated by switching pulse noises derived from the rising and falling voltages of the entrance and exit deflection electric sectors of MULTUM-S II (Figure 3).…”

“…A schematic illustrating the data acquisition system for the electrostatic‐induced charge detection is shown in Figure 2. This system resembles that of the data acquisition system reported by Bajo et al 13 The pulse signals from the A250CF preamplifier are converted into 10‐bits digital signals using the NI PXIe‐5160 (5160) digitizer. The sampling rate and voltage resolution are 104.167 × 10 6 samples s −1 and 48.8 μV (10‐bits and ±0.025 V for peak‐to‐peak voltage), respectively.…”

Visualization of DNA Replication in Single Chromosome by Stable Isotope Labeling

“…Ion-induced SE images were obtained with gallium (Ga) focused ion beam current of 3 pA and an acceleration voltage of 20kV (Ebata et al, 2012). The secondary neutral mass spectrometer also enabled analysis with a high lateral resolution of up to 10 nm and high mass resolution of 10 6 for full width half maximum (Bajo et al, 2016(Bajo et al, , 2019Ebata et al, 2012;Nagata et al, 2019;Tonotani et al, 2016;Yurimoto et al, 2016). In this regard, the primary ion beam was focused to a diameter of 100 nm at a current of 400 pA with an acceleration voltage of 20 kV (Nagata et al, 2019).…”

Aberration-corrected focused ion beam for time-of-flight secondary neutral mass spectrometry

“…The spherical aberration was evaluated by shifting an aperture to a given direction from the right position. We used LIMAS, an SNMS instrument, at Hokkaido University 13,18,28,31) for our measurements and continuous primary ion probes of 69 Ga + (20 keV and 1-500 pA) to obtain secondary electron (SE) images. Dwell times at each pixel were variable depending on SE intensities from 16 to 65 μs.…”

“…We used LIMAS, an SNMS instrument, at Hokkaido University 13,18,28,31) for our measurements and continuous primary ion probes of 69 Ga + (20 keV and 1-500 pA) to obtain SE images. Dwell times at each pixel were variable depending on SE intensities from 16 to 65 μs.…”