A fragment-free ionization technique for organic mass spectrometry with large Ar cluster ions

In this report, we propose to use the incidence of cluster ions that are much larger than molecular ions as a fragment-free ionization technique for organic secondary ion mass spectrometry. Secondary ions were measured for amino acid and peptide targets bombarded with 3, 8 and 13 keV large Ar cluster ions. The relative yields of the fragment ions decreased drastically with increasing incident cluster size. Fragment-free ionization of the molecule was accomplished when large cluster ions with optimized size and energy were incident on a biomolecular sample.