Tandem Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry with a Curved Field Reflectron

The unique focusing properties of the curved-field reflectron provide a simple solution to the problem of compensating for the broad range of energies of product ions produced postsource in a time-of-flight mass spectrometer. This has been shown previously for the technique known as postsource decay, but in this report we demonstrate its use for tandem time-of-flight mass spectrometry using a high-performance MALDI time-of-flight instrument modified by the addition of a collision chamber to enable the recording of mass-selected product ions formed by collision-induced dissociation (CID). In particular, the curved-field reflectron enables the use of the full 20-keV kinetic energy provided by the ion source extraction voltage as the collision energy in the laboratory frame and obviates the need to reaccelerate the product ions, using a second "source" or "lift" cell. Results are presented for the collision-induced dissociation of fullerenes over a range of collision gas pressures and precursor ion attenuation. In addition, CID tandem mass spectra are obtained for several peptides.