Chemical ionization mass spectrometry using carbon nanotube field emission electron sources.

A novel chemical ionization (CI) source has been developed based on a carbon nanotube (CNT) field emission electron source. The CNT-based electron source was evaluated and compared with a standard filament thermionic electron source in a commercial explosives trace detection desktop mass spectrometer. This work demonstrates the first reported use of a CNT-based ion source capable of collecting CI mass spectra.

Compressive mass analysis on quadrupole ion trap systems.

Conventionally, quadrupole ion trap mass spectrometers eject ions of different mass-to-charge ratio (m/z) in a sequential fashion by performing a scan of the rf trapping voltage amplitude. Due to the inherent sparsity of most mass spectra, the detector measures no signal for much of the scan time. By exploiting this sparsity property, we propose a new compressive and multiplexed mass analysis approach--multi Resonant Frequency Excitation (mRFE) ejection.