Effects of Magnetic and Electric Field Uniformity on Coded Aperture Imaging Quality in a Cycloidal Mass Analyzer

Cycloidal mass analyzers are unique sector mass analyzers as they exhibit perfect double focusing, making them ideal for incorporating spatial aperture coding, which can increase the throughput of a mass analyzer without affecting the resolving power. However, the focusing properties of the cycloidal mass analyzer depend on the uniformity of the electric and magnetic fields. In this paper, finite element simulation and charged particle tracing were used to investigate the effect of field uniformity on imaging performance of a cycloidal mass analyzer. For the magnetic field, we evaluate a new permanent magnet geometry by comparing it to a traditional geometry. Results indicate that creating an aperture image in a cycloidal mass spectrometer with the same FWHM as the slit requires less than 1% variation in magnetic field strength along the ion trajectories. The new magnet design, called the opposed dipole magnet, has less than 1% field variation over an area approximately 62 × 65 mm; nearly twice the area available in a traditional design of similar size and weight. This allows ion imaging across larger detector arrays without loss of resolving power. In addition, we compare the aperture imaging quality of a traditionally used cycloidal mass spectrometer electric design with a new optimized design with improved field uniformity. Graphical abstract ᅟ.