Gas-phase ion-molecule interactions in a collision reaction cell with triple quadrupole-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry: Investigations with N2O as the reaction gas

Nitrous oxide (N2O) was used as a reaction gas to investigate the gas-phase ion-molecule interactions using the Agilent 8900 QQQ-ICP-MS. A multi-element standard containing 45 elements, from Be to Pb, was used for the measurement of ions with QQQ-ICP-MS in the presence and absence of N2O. The main product ion species observed were oxides and nitrides. Comparison of the N2O reaction results with similar measurements conducted with O2 revealed that N2O was more effective at forming oxides in general: The cations Cd+ and Pb+ were shown to produce oxides with N2O where the reaction did not occur with O2. Nitrous oxide was also shown to produce a significant amount of nitride species in a few cases. The general reactivity was shown to be consistent with density functional theory (DFT)-predicted reaction enthalpies, such that all predicted exothermic reactions produced product ions at levels at least 1% of the unreacted ion. Our results show that reaction enthalpy is a reasonable predictor of reactivity with N2O on the timescales of the interactions in non-thermal ICP-MS/MS systems. Our work demonstrates the utility of two relatively new platforms (commercial elemental ICP-MS/MS and EMSL Arrows interface to the NWChem program suite), which allows for the study of a large number of elements within a short period. While DFT with the basis sets utilized here is not the most accurate computational method, it is also not computationally expensive and is shown to be suitable for predicting gas phase reactivity in the QQQ-ICP-MS for the majority of ions studied. The ease and rapidity of data collection and DFT calculations has the potential to be very impactful for the identification of targeted reaction chemistries to be leveraged for analytical method development, such as for the inline separation of isobaric interferences from analytes of interest.

Automated summary

Nitrous oxide (N2O) was used as a reaction gas for gas-phase ion-molecule interactions, showing superior oxide formation compared to O2. The study also revealed the potential of N2O to produce significant nitride species and the consistency of experimental results with predicted reaction enthalpies. New platforms demonstrated utility for studying a wide range of elements efficiently.