A Penning trap mass spectrometer for the study of cluster ions

Abstract

A Penning trap system has been set up for storing and investigating cluster ions over time ranges from microseconds up to minutes. This enables studies of cluster reactions with extremely low cross sections and the observation of their time dependence in a new regime. The ions are created externally by laser vaporization, cooled by adiabatic expansion of a supersonic beam, and injected into the Penning trap. Detection of reaction products is achieved by combining the advantages of two complementary approaches, viz. the high resolution of Fourier transform mass spectrometry and the high sensitivity of single-ion counting with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer. The performance of the apparatus is illustrated by results of recent cluster experiments.