Gridless Overtone Mobility Spectrometry

A novel overtone mobility spectrometry (OMS) instrument utilizing a gridless elimination mechanism and cooperative radio frequency confinement is described. The gridless elimination region uses a set of mobility-discriminating radial electric fields that are designed so that the frequency of field application results in selective transmission and elimination of ions. To neutralize ions with mobilities that do not match the field application frequency, active elimination regions radially defocus ions toward the lens walls. Concomitantly, a lens-dependent radio frequency waveform is applied to the transmission regions of the drift tube resulting in radial confinement for mobility-matched ions. Compared with prior techniques, which use many grids for ion elimination, the new gridless configuration substantially reduces indiscriminate ion losses. A description of the apparatus and elimination process, including detailed simulations showing how ions are transmitted and eliminated is presented. A prototype 28 cm long OMS instrument is shown to have a resolving power of 20 and is capable of attomole detection limits of a model peptide (angiotensin I) spiked into a complex mixture (in this case peptides generated from digestion of beta-casein with trypsin).