ABSTRACT
The addition of mass information to mobility information opens new horizons for both ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) and mass spectrometry (MS). The combination of mass and mobility within one spectrum provides information on ion structure that is not possible with either method alone. By adding ion mobility information to mass information, the size of an ion as well as its mass may be measured. For example, MS is often blind to low levels of ions in complex mixtures due to chemical noise of the matrix and to isomeric/isobaric components of the mixture. Thus, the addition of size information to mass information expands the parametric space that can be used for ion detection.
