Spontaneous and deflected drift-trajectories in orthogonal acceleration time-of-flight mass spectrometry

Orthogonal acceleration is a method for gating ions from an ion beam into a time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometer. The technique involves a pulsed electric field to apply acceleration directed orthogonally to an ion beam. This approach is useful for coupling continuous ion sources to TOF mass analyzers. Most instruments of this type, which have been described in the literature, use steering electrodes after the orthogonal acceleration step. Those velocity components of ions originating from the ion beam velocity are minimized so that the deflected drift-trajectory is parallel to a transverse flight tube. In an alternative geometry the ion beam velocity is conserved and the drift-trajectory after the orthogonal acceleration step is spontaneous. The differences between the space-time focusing ability with spontaneous and deflected drift-trajectories are discussed and investigated. Trajectory calculations indicate that deflection fields placed after the orthogonal acceleration step distort the ion packet because, in this geometry, the flight-time to the detector is dependent on the position that the ions enter the steering optics. Increasing the duty-cycle efficiency by sampling longer sections of the continuous ion beam leads to a degradation of resolving power. Employing a spontaneous drift-trajectory after orthogonal acceleration provides the advantage that the arrival time spread for isobaric ions is, in principle, independent of the length of the ion beam sampled. The major implication of these findings is that simultaneously optimized sensitivity and resolving power may not be achievable with the deflected drift-trajectory instruments. The calculations are in agreement with results from the published data of a number of groups who have built instruments based on the orthogonal acceleration principle.