Motivation

The primary goals in the development of atmospheric pressure laser ionization:

• Provide an alternative or complementary AP ionization method to the established techniques APCI and APPI.
• Investigate the ionization mechanisms including secondary reactions following the primary ionizations step.
• Use the particular characteristics of APLI for applications in chemical analytics and actual mass-spectrometry method development
• Hyphenate APLI MS with diverse chromatographic and electrophoretic pre-separation stages.

The motivation for establishing this research program stems from diverse areas of interest, focusing on:

• The fundamental understanding of the ionization mechanism and induced ion chemistry within the AP regime.
• Systematic investigation of the ionization mechanism and induced ion chemistry within the AP regime.
• The design, construction and application of powerful API-MS interfaces, which allow the ultra-sensitive and selective quantification of analytes in diverse matrices.

Initial work on APLI has readily shown that both areas are closely related – it is hardly conceivable to understand the success or failure of a certain API technique without a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental processes involved; on the other hand fundamental research in this framework makes only sense when all efforts are tightly focused pushing real-world applications. The following pages illustrate the fundamental approach as well as in-depth information on coupling stage design and performance is provided.