Detection of nerve agents using proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry with ammonia as reagent gas

The chemical warfare agents (CWA) Sarin, Soman, Cyclosarin and Tabun were characterised by proton transfer mass spectrometry (PTRMS). It was found that PTRMS is a suitable technique to detect nerve agents highly sensitively, highly selectively and in near real-time. Methods were found to suppress molecule fragmentation which is significant under PTRMS hollow cathode ionisation conditions. In this context, the drift voltage (as one of the most important system parameters) was varied and ammonia was introduced as an additional chemical reagent gas. Auxiliary chemicals such as ammonia affect ionisation processes and are quite common in context with detectors for CWAs based on ion mobility spectrometry (IMS). With both, variation of drift voltage and ammonia as the reagent gas, fragmentation can be suppressed effectively. Suppression of fragmentation is crucial particularly concerning the implementation of an algorithm for automated agent identification in field applications. On the other hand, appearance of particular fragments might deliver additional information. Degradation and rearrangement products of nerve agents are not distinctive for the particular agent but for the chemical class they belong to. It was found that switching between ammonia doped and ordinary water ionisation chemistry can easily be performed within a few seconds. Making use of this effect it is possible to switch between fragment and molecular ion peak spectra. Thus, targeted fragmentation can be used to confirm identification based only on single peak detection. PTRMS turned out to be a promising technique for future CWA detectors. In terms of sensitivity, response time and selectivity (or confidence of identification, respectively) PTRMS performs as a bridging technique between IMS and GC-MS.