The effects of collisional cooling on the storage and detection of ions in a quadrupole ion trap mass spectrometer are examined. Four parameters that affect the storage of ions are evaluated: the pressure of the buffer gas: the qz value which establishes the ion trapping environment; the cooling time during which ions may collapse to the center of the trap; and the supplementary a.c. voltage used to kinetically excite selected ions. The ion trap may be operated effectively at a low helium pressure (0.1 mTorr) if a sufficient delay period is added to allow the diffuse ion cloud to collapse to the center of the trap prior to detection. For a typical experiment, this modified operation at low pressures involves allowing the ions to undergo approximately 30–100 collisions (i.e. in a ≈30 ms interval at 0.1 mTorr). At low helium pressures (≈0.1 mTorr), more ions may be trapped at higher qz values. Collision-activated dissociation (CAD) at low helium pressures indicates that the average internal energy deposition is higher, and sensitivity is not lost, if a collisional cooling delay is added. This latter result potentially has great analytical relevance for CAD of biomolecules which require greater internal energy deposition to induce fragmentation.
Relation:
Proceedings of the 40th ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics, pp.1757-1758
