ABSTRACT
In practice, there are many complex ion-focusing components in a time-of-flight (TOF) mass analyzer that ensure that the maximum number of analyte ions reach the detector, and also that undesired photons, neutral species, and interferences are ejected from the ion beam. Although the first TOF mass spectrometer was first described in the literature in the late 1940s, it has taken more than 50 years to adapt it for use with a commercial inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer. The simultaneous nature of sampling ions in TOF offers distinct advantages over traditional scanning quadrupole technology for inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) applications in which large amounts of data need to be captured in a short span of time. Although there are real benefits of using TOF over quadrupole technology for some ICP-MS applications, there are also subtle differences in the capabilities of each type of TOF design.
