Laser-cooling-assisted mass spectrometry

Abstract

Mass spectrometry is used in a wide range of scientific disciplines including proteomics, pharmaceutics, forensics, and fundamental physics and chemistry. Given this ubiquity, there is a worldwide effort to improve the efficiency and resolution of mass spectrometers. However, the performance of all techniques is ultimately limited by the initial phase-space distribution of the molecules being analyzed. Here, we dramatically reduce the width of this initial phase-space distribution by sympathetically cooling the input molecules with laser-cooled, co-trapped atomic ions, improving both the mass resolution and detection efficiency of a time-of-flight mass spectrometer by over an order of magnitude. Detailed molecular dynamics simulations verify the technique and aid with evaluating its effectiveness. Our technique appears to be applicable to other types of mass spectrometers.

6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Destabilization of dark states and optical spectroscopy in Zeeman-degenerate atomic systems
• Specific chemical reactivities of spatially separated 3-aminophenol conformers with cold Ca${}^{+}$ ions
• Non-Destructive Identification of Cold and Extremely Localized Single Molecular Ions
• Cold atom-ion experiments in hybrid traps
• Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Sympathetic Crystallization of Molecular Ions
• Neutral gas sympathetic cooling of an ion in a Paul trap
• The role of electronic excitation in cold atom-ion chemistry
• Laser cooling of externally produced Mg ions in a Penning trap for sympathetic cooling of highly charged ions
• Translational cooling and storage of protonated proteins in an ion trap at subkelvin temperatures
• Molecular ion trap-depletion spectroscopy of BaCl${}^{+}$
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• Rotational State Analysis of AlH+ by Two-Photon Dissociation
• Action spectroscopy of SrCl${}^{+}$ using an integrated ion trap time-of-flight mass spectrometer

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Synthesis of mixed hypermetallic oxide BaOCa${}^{+}$ from laser-cooled reagents in an atom-ion hybrid trap
• High resolution ion trap time-of-flight mass spectrometer for cold trapped ion experiments
• Optical Mass Spectrometry of Cold ${\mathrm{RaOH}}^{+}$ and ${{\mathrm{RaOCH}}_3}^{+}$
• Spectroscopy of a synthetic trapped ion qubit
• Trapping and sympathetic cooling of single thorium ions for spectroscopy
• Observation of vibrational overtones by single molecule resonant photodissociation
• Coulomb crystal mass spectrometry in a digital ion trap
• Improved magneto-optical trapping of Ca
• A hybrid ion-atom trap with integrated high resolution mass spectrometer
• Ion trap with integrated time-of-flight mass spectrometer
• Action spectroscopy of SrCl${}^{+}$ using an integrated ion trap time-of-flight mass spectrometer
• Determining Reaction Pathways at Low Temperatures by Isotopic Substitution: The Case of BeD+ + H2O
• Photodissociation spectroscopy of the dysprosium monochloride molecular ion
• Number-Resolved Detection of Dark Ions in Coulomb Crystals
• Ion counting and temperature determination of Coulomb-crystallized laser-cooled ions in traps using convolutional neural networks
• A versatile apparatus for simultaneous trapping of multiple species of ultracold atoms and ions to enable studies of low energy collisions and cold chemistry