A novel magnetic-electric-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometer of ultra-high abundance sensitivity

•Abundance sensitivity of mass spectrometers was discussed extensively.•Abundance sensitivity could be improved by adding a quadrupole to magnetic sector.•Tandem mass spectrometer of magnetic-electric-quadrupole type was developed.•Abundance sensitivity of better than 6 × 10−10 was achieved.•Improving scheme was proposed for better sensitivity.

A novel magnetic-electric-quadrupole (MEQ) tandem mass spectrometer is introduced in this paper. As there is a huge gap between the kinetic energies of ions in the magnetic sector and that in the quadrupole mass spectrometers, no sector-quadrupole type tandem mass spectrometer has been developed before. However, with the help of a set of specially designed ion-optical lens, we have developed an MEQ tandem mass spectrometer. Measurement result shows that the abundance sensitivity of this instrument was better than 6 × 10−10, which was nearly 3 orders of magnitude higher than the tandem mass spectrometer without the quadrupole.

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