Modeling the Detection of Organic and Inorganic Compounds Using Iodide-Based Chemical Ionization

Iodide-based chemical ionization mass spectrometry (CIMS) has been used to detect and measure concentrations of several atmospherically relevant organic and inorganic compounds. The significant electronegativity of iodide and the strong acidity of hydroiodic acid makes electron transfer and proton abstraction essentially negligible, and the soft nature of the adduct formation ionization technique reduces the chances of sample fragmentation. In addition, iodide has a large negative mass defect, which, when combined with the high resolving power of a high resolution time-of-flight chemical ionization mass spectrometer (HR-ToF-CIMS), provides good selectivity. In this work, we use quantum chemical methods to calculate the binding energies, enthalpies and free energies for clusters of an iodide ion with a number of atmospherically relevant organic and inorganic compounds. Systematic configurational sampling of the free molecules and clusters was carried out at the B3LYP/6-31G* level, followed by subsequent calculations at the PBE/SDD and DLPNO-CCSD(T)/def2-QZVPP//PBE/aug-cc-pVTZ-PP levels. The binding energies, enthalpies, and free energies thus obtained were then compared to the iodide-based University of Washington HR-ToF-CIMS (UW-CIMS) instrument sensitivities for these molecules. We observed a reasonably linear relationship between the cluster binding enthalpies and logarithmic instrument sensitivities already at the PBE/SDD level, which indicates that relatively simple quantum chemical methods can predict the sensitivity of an iodide-based CIMS instrument toward most molecules. However, higher level calculations were needed to treat some outlier molecules, most notably oxalic acid and methylerythritol. Our calculations also corroborated the recent experimental findings that the molecules that the UW-CIMS detects at maximum sensitivity usually have binding enthalpies to iodide which are higher than about 26 kcal/mol, depending slightly on the level of theory.