Abstract
The effect of fringing fields on the divergence of the ion beam exiting an RF quadrupole ion guide was studied using a computer simulation. It was shown that reducing the strength of the RF field towards the ion guide exit reduces ion beam divergence. Further improvement was demonstrated when creating a DC gradient towards the exit. The results of the numerical simulation were verified experimentally using a time-of-flight (TOF) mass analyzer with orthogonal acceleration. Decreasing the ion beam divergence resulted in considerably improved mass resolution of the instrument.
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Published online January 30, 2006
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Berkout, V.D., Doroshenko, V.M. Improving the quality of the ion beam exiting a quadrupole ion guide. The official journal of The American Society for Mass Spectrometry 17, 335–340 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasms.2005.12.002
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasms.2005.12.002