What is metastable ion peak in mass spectrometry?

August 2, 2019 Off By idswater

What is metastable ion peak in mass spectrometry?


What is meant by metastable peak?

A metastable peak is a peak on the mass spectrum generated by ions created from decay of metastable ions in flight.

What is the importance of metastable peak?

Importance/significance of metastable peaks: The metastable peaks in the mass spectrum greatly contribute in structure elucidation. From the positions of the parent ion & the daughter ion, the position of the metastable ion is calculated as given above & confirmed in the spectrum.

What is the importance of metastable ions in Mass Spectrometry?

Metastable ions play important role in the background formation; therefore, the knowledge of the specific features of their emergence is necessary. In this work, we report the study of the reasons and laws of the formation of ions of this type.

How do you calculate metastable ions?

Metastable Ions For ions that fragment after reaching full ion acceleration, the kinetic energy of the fragment ions is represented by E = M f e V M P , , where M represents the mass of the fragment and parent ions and eV is the accelerating voltage.

What do you mean by metastable ion?

The term ‘metastable’ has been applied to those ions in a mass spectrometer that have just sufficient energy to fragment some time after leaving the ion source but before arriving at the detector.

How metastable ions are generated?

It must be emphasized that the term metastable, refers only to ions that are able to fragment during flight, by virtue of the internal energy that they acquired within the ion source, not after acceleration therefrom, by collisions with a target gas, nor by radiative excitation as they traverse the apparatus.

What’s a molecular ion peak?

In the mass spectrum, the heaviest ion (the one with the greatest m/z value) is likely to be the molecular ion. Look for the peak with the highest value for m/z, and that value is the relative formula mass of the compound.

Why does metastable state exist?

Metastable states appear for two reasons. The first is determined by the thermodynamics of phase transitions. When the limit of metastability is absolute and the transition barrier is high, the metastable state can exist long enough to be detected experimentally.