A B‐TOF mass spectrometer for the analysis of ions with extreme high start‐up energies

Abstract

Weak magnetic deflection is combined with two acceleration stage time-of-flight mass spectrometry and subsequent position-sensitive ion detection. The experimental method, called B-TOF mass spectrometry, is described with respect to its theoretical background and some experimental results. It is demonstrated that the technique has distinct advantages over other approaches, with special respect to the identification and analysis of very highly energetic ions with an initially large energy broadening (up to 1 MeV) and with high charge states (up to 30+). Similar energetic targets are a common case in intense laser-matter interaction processes found during laser ablation, laser-cluster and laser-molecule interaction and fast particle and x-ray generation from laser-heated plasma.

Decrypting the charge-resolved kinetic-energy spectrum in the Coulomb explosion of argon clusters

“…Such a comparison requires a highly accurate measurement technique, which has been beyond experimental reach thus far. Earlier experiments using TOF methods [6] or the modified TOF with magnetic fields (MTOF) [7,8] have * mkrism@tifr.res.in; http://www.tifr.res.in/∼uphill not convincingly addressed this problem due to issues of large ion energy spread for each of the large numbers of charge states.…”