Coulomb crystal mass spectrometry in a digital ion trap

Abstract

We present a mass spectrometric technique for identifying the masses and relative abundances of Coulomb-crystallized ions held in a linear Paul trap. A digital radiofrequency waveform is employed to generate the trapping potential, as this can be cleanly switched off, and static dipolar fields subsequently applied to the trap electrodes for ion ejection. Excellent detection efficiency is demonstrated for Ca+ and CaF+ ions from bi-component Ca+/CaF+ Coulomb crystals prepared by reaction of Ca+ with CH3F. A quantitative linear relationship is observed between ion number and the corresponding integrated TOF peak, independent of the ionic species. The technique is applicable to a diverse range of multi-component Coulomb crystals - demonstrated here for Ca+/NH3+/NH4+ and Ca+/CaOH+/CaOD+ crystals - and will facilitate the measurement of ion-molecule reaction rates and branching ratios in complicated reaction systems.

References in corpus (5)

• Non-Destructive Identification of Cold and Extremely Localized Single Molecular Ions
• Probing isotope effects in chemical reactions using single ions
• Motional sidebands and direct measurement of the cooling rate in the resonance fluorescence of a single trapped ion
• Laser-cooling-assisted mass spectrometry
• Weighing of trapped ion crystals and its applications

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• Direct temperature determination of a sympathetically cooled large 113Cd+ ion crystal for a microwave clock
• A hybrid ion-atom trap with integrated high resolution mass spectrometer
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• Buffer gas cooling of ions in time-dependent traps using ultracold atoms
• Observation of effects due to an atom's electric quadrupole polarizability