Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry by Using Surface Plasmon Excitation on Gold Nanoparticle

We show development of a laser desorption/ionization (LDI) method with ultralligh sensitivity by adding gold nanoparticles with a diameter of several tens of nanometers into a sample solution. In this paper, we succeeded in detection of an ultratrace amount of sample molecules, which is less than several hundred zeptomoles. This result suggest that the charge interaction based on surface plasmon (SP) excitation is very effective for ultrahigh sensitivity in LDI method.