Soft-Landing Ion Mobility and Preparative Mass Spectrometry

The soft landing of ionized nanoclusters, metal-ligand complexes, polymers, and biopolymers on a hard surface is a challenging task, as most soft landed molecules either contain too much kinetic energy, usually in the range of 0.1 - 50 KeV. This amount of energy is not acceptable for the landing of nanoclusters as the cluster would fragment upon impact. The design and fabrication of a novel soft-landing system using front-end chemistry and ion optics at pressures spanning from 1 – 100 torr rather than usual UHV conditions, and an actual softer land of around 0.01-1.0 eV, would deposit the clusters intact on a surface allowing further characterization of deposited materials on surfaces.

Electrospray-Ion Trap Mass Spectrometry is an effective mechanism to ionize and isolate specific biomolecules. This coupled to our SLIM (Softlanding Ion Mobility) is a way to single out molecules of interest from a large mixture and softland the ion of interest with a multitude of matices. Below is the 2 schematics of our preparative instruments, one coupled to a Thermo LTQ.