The mechanisms of collisional activation of ions in mass spectrometry

✍ Scribed by Paul M. Mayer; Clement Poon

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 903 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0277-7037
• DOI: 10.1002/mas.20225

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

This article is a review of the mechanisms responsible for collisional activation of ions in mass spectrometers. Part I gives a general introduction to the processes occurring when a projectile ion and neutral target collide. The theoretical background to the physical phenomena of curve‐crossing excitation (for electronic and vibrational excitation), impulsive collisions (for direct translational to vibrational energy transfer), and the formation of long‐lived collision intermediates is presented. Part II highlights the experimental and computational investigations that have been made into collisional activation for four experimental conditions: high (>100 eV) and intermediate (1–100 eV) center‐of‐mass collision energies, slow heating collisions (multiple low‐energy collisions) and collisions with surfaces. The emphasis in this section is on the derived post‐collision internal energy distributions that have been found to be typical for projectile ions undergoing collisions in these regimes. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Mass Spec Rev 28:608–639, 2009