| AVS 65th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Applied Surface Science Division | Wednesday Sessions |
| Session AS+SE-WeA |
| Session: | Industrial and Practical Applications of Surface Analysis |
| Presenter: | Julia Zakel, IONTOF GmbH, Germany |
| Authors: | A. Pirkl, IONTOF GmbH, Germany J. Zakel, IONTOF GmbH, Germany D. Rading, IONTOF GmbH, Germany N.J. Havercroft, IONTOF USA S. Kayser, IONTOF GmbH, Germany H. Arlinghaus, IONTOF GmbH, Germany R. Moellers, IONTOF GmbH, Germany E. Niehuis, IONTOF GmbH, Germany |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
The fast and reliable characterisation of unknown contaminants in quality control procedures is crucial in many industrial areas to understand manufacturing errors and avoid production downtime. TOF-SIMS nowadays plays an important role in this area especially due to its fast imaging capabilities that enable the acquisition of chemical surface images with a lateral resolution in the 100 nm range.
However, molecular identification of unknown substances can be hampered by constraints in mass resolution and mass accuracy of a standard TOF analyser. To overcome this problem, we have developed a new Hybrid SIMS instrument, which uniquely combines all advantages of a state-of-the-art TOF-SIMS with the mass spectrometry performance of an Orbitrap mass analyzer (Q ExactiveTM HF) [1]. The Q Exactivemass spectrometer provides a mass resolution of more than 240,000 @ m/z = 200, sub ppm mass accuracy, and fully integrated MS/MS capabilities that allow low energy collision induced fragmentation for structural analysis of complex molecules. All in all this dramatically increases the level of confidence for the SIMS analysis.
Different applications ranging from polymers to metals will be presented with a focus on the identification of unknown substances by MS/MS in combination with high resolution mass spectrometry. Furthermore dedicated measurement modes and strategies that can be applied to different forms of contaminants will be presented. The use of databases will be showcased which further assists and confirms the results of a manual data evaluation.
[1] The 3D OrbiSIMS – Label-Free Metabolic Imaging with Sub-cellular Lateral Resolution and High Mass Resolving Power, Passarelli et al., Nature Methods, 2017, 14(12):1175-1183, DOI 10.1038/nmeth.4504.