Study of In-Trap Ion Clouds by Ion Trajectory Simulations.

Gaussian distribution has been utilized to describe the global number density distribution of ion cloud in the Paul trap, which is known as the thermal equilibrium theory and widely used in theoretical modeling of ion clouds in the ion traps. Using ion trajectory simulations, however, the ion clouds can now also be treated as a dynamic ion flow field and the location-dependent features could now be characterized. This study was carried out to better understand the in-trap ion cloud properties, such as the local particle velocity and temperature.

Equilibrium configuration of the 1u state of hydrogen molecular ion in a magnetic field.

Using the variational method based on the Gaussian basis set, the authors investigate the 1u state of hydrogen molecular ion in a non-parallel magnetic field with respect to the fixed molecular axis. At sufficiently small field strength, the equilibrium configuration prefers the perpendicular orientation, in which the (relative) orientation θ between the magnetic field and the molecular axis is 90°. With increasing field strength, the orientation θ of the equilibrium configuration decreases, and is neither the parallel orientation nor the perpendicular orientation at field strength between 10(9) G and 2.

Characteristics of electrical field and ion motion in surface-electrode ion traps.

In this article, we calculated the potential function of the surface-electrode ion trap (SEIT) by using Green's function method, optimized trap size, obtained the coefficients of the multipoles and analyzed ion trajectories in the RF potential. The optimized SEIT not only increases its trapping well depth by a factor of about 15, but also has relatively good linearity of the field (or large quadrupole component). The current design of SEIT can work well either as the ion guide for ion transmission or as the ion trap for ion confinement.

Potential distribution and transmission characteristics in a curved quadrupole ion guide.

The potential distribution in the curved quadrupole is exactly characterized by the Laplace equation, and an approximate solution to the Laplace equation is calculated. We represent the Laplace equation under the coordinates named minimal rotation frame (MRF) and derive an expression on the hexapole and octopole superposition. Our conclusion is in agreement with the results by the numerical (SIMION) method.

Characteristics of stability boundary and frequency in nonlinear ion trap mass spectrometer.

In this article, the Poincare-Lighthill-Kuo (PLK) method is used to derive an analytical expression on the stability boundary and the ion trajectory. A multipole superposition model mainly including octopole component is adopted to represent the inhomogeneities of the field. In this method, both the motional displacement and secular frequency of ions have been expanded to asymptotic series by the scale of nonlinear term epsilon, which represents a weak octopole field.