Mass-Spectrometric Investigations of Silver Clusters

Abstract

We report results of experimental studies on the silver clusters formation in laser desorption and matrix assisted laser desorption. Time-of-flight mass spectrometer was used to control process itself. Firstly, we investigated dependence of silver salts of variety chemical nature on formation of silver clusters. The most prominent was usage of organic silver salts (silver trifluoroacetate and silver benzoate). The biggest species obtained was Ag + 45(silver benzoate). Secondly, we examined influence of organic matrix (2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid) on formation efficiency of silver clusters in matrix assisted laser desorption. In all cases we observed increase of silver clusters size.

Efficient Formation of Size-Selected Clusters upon Pickup of Dopants into Multiply Charged Helium Droplets

“…In particular, silver turns out to have pronounced antimicrobial properties [ 39 , 40 ]. Silver clusters have been formed via various techniques, such as inert gas condensation [ 41 ]; direct laser vaporization [ 42 ]; laser vaporization into a buffer gas and supersonic expansion [ 43 ]; ion sputtering [ 44 , 45 , 46 ]; MALDI [ 47 , 48 ] and pickup into helium droplets [ 49 ]. Common to all these studies are pronounced intensity anomalies in the cluster size distributions determined by mass spectrometry (see Figure 2 ).…”

“…This distributes the ion yield among different masses and reduces the height of the most abundant peak with increasing cluster size. All cluster size distributions, except for the experiments by Ernst and Hauser [ 49 ] and Szymanska et al [ 48 ], were determined from the peak heights of the published mass spectra. It is not clear how the ion yield was determined in the other two studies, i.e., peak heights (most abundant isotopologue) or peak areas (sum of all different isotopologues).…”

“…The correction for isotopic distribution only affects the most abundant silver cluster from the measurements of Staudt et al [ 50 ] and Katakuse et al [ 47 ], by shifting it from n = 1 to n = 3. Please note that the cluster size distributions published by Keki et al [ 47 ] and Szymanski et al [ 48 ] are incomplete with missing data points for several of the most likely highly abundant cluster sizes. Only the very early measurement by Hoareau et al [ 41 ] and the recently published cluster size distributions by Ernst and Hauser [ 49 ] exhibit a distribution that peaks at an n , max > 1.…”

Evaluation and optimization of the influence of silver cluster ions on the MALDI-TOF-MS analysis of polystyrene nanoplastic polymers

“…This led to the hypothesis that the MALDI-TOF-MS method matrix may inuence the creation of silver clusters. 47 There is research employing silver compounds and organic matrices of diverse chemical natures in the literature. 20 Silver tri-uoroacetate has been utilized previously, while ATH, ACTH and PRN were utilized in this study.…”

Generation of new AgmTen clusters via laser ablation synthesis using Ag‐Te nano‐composite as precursor. Quadrupole ion trap time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry

“…The use of laser ablation synthesis (LAS) to generate tellurium and silver clusters has been described, and the LAS of silver telluride clusters has also been studied . However, only a limited number of silver tellurides have been described.…”