Letter: The formation of ion packages with ultrashort duration in laser ion source

A new approach to the formation of ultrashort laser ion packages in the ion source of time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometer for elemental analysis is described. This is achieved by installing a wedge-shaped reflector with special correcting plates. The reflector provides time and space focusing of the ion packages. Such time focusing allows to reduce the ion package duration up to 1 ns. The proposed approach allows more than order of magnitude increase in the resolution of the laser TOF mass spectrometer with an axially symmetric electrostatic analyzer to 10,000-13,000. In this Letter the theoretical calculations justifying the proposed method are presented.