Accelerator mass spectrometry of molecular ions

The use of tandem accelerators for accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) allows to literally “analyze” molecules. When a molecular ion with mass M and charge Q is injected at the low-energy side, it is efficiently broken up into its atomic constituents during the stripping process in the terminal. At the high-energy side the positively charged atomic ions are again analyzed by their mass-to-charge ratio and by their energy in the detector (and eventually by their nuclear charge, too). We show the usefulness of the AMS method by identifying unambiguously the doubly-charged negative molecule (43Ca19F4)2− for the first time. It considerably eases the task that the total mass M = 119 is odd, so the di-anion is injected at the half-integer mass-to-charge ratio M/Q = 59.5, where no singly charged ions can interfere. The full power of AMS is needed when we try to proof the existence of di-anions with an integer M/Q, e.g. (23Na35Cl3)2−, whose stability is of interest for atomic physics theory.