History of mass measurements in time-of-flight mass analyzers

•Mass measurements on short-lived high energy ions as obtained by time-of-flight mass analyzers have significantly helped to provide information on the binding energies of short-lived nuclei and thus helped to provide a basis for astrophysical calculations.•Low-energy time-of-flight mass analyzers have become one of the major tools for the mass analysis of molecule ions and thus today are indispensable for organic chemistry.•New developments of multi-pass low-energy time-of-flight mass analyzers are starting to obtain mass resolving powers of several 100,000.

Time-of-flight mass analyzers have been developed since the 1950s, but there was a 30 year period during which new developments were slow. However, in the 1980s new ideas were proposed for the mass analysis of high energy ions, allowing an overview of the masses of most existing nuclei, and for low energy ions a fast and accurate identification of large molecules became possible. Since the 1990s especially multi-pass energy-isochronous time-of-flight mass analyzers have been developed for high as well as for low energy ions.

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