A time-of-flight, drift cell, quadrupole apparatus for ion mobility measurements

We present an instrument that incorporates a combination of three different ion sources, an (upstream) time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOFMS). an ion mobility cell and a quadrupole rnass filter. The key features of our setup are a TOFMS in front of the drift cell which allows the injection of short, intense, mass selected packets into the cell and the combination of different ion sources for increased versatility. Besides a detailed description of the experimental setup, we compare it to existing ion mobility configurations and show results on fullerenes, fullerene derivatives, large inorganic complexes and metal clusters. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.