The rise and fall of adenine clusters in the gas phase: a glimpse into crystal growth and nucleation.

The emergence of a crystal nucleus from disordered states is a critical and challenging aspect of the crystallization process, primarily due to the extremely short length and timescales involved. Methods such as liquid-cell or low-dose focal-series transmission electron microscopy (TEM) are often employed to probe these events. In this study, we demonstrate that ion mobility spectrometry-mass spectrometry (IMS-MS) offers a complementary and insightful perspective on the nucleation process by examining the sizes and shapes of small clusters, specifically those ranging from n = 2 to 40.