Towards miniaturization of time of flight mass spectrometers: A static voltage linear resonator-like set up for ion packages

Time of flight mass spectrometers (TOF-MS) are very versatile gas analyzers for environmental monitoring. High resolving power, fast response time and robustness count to the main advantage of this technique. Disadvantages are the necessity for high vacuum and thus large turbo pumps, as well as the size of the instrument. One very actual goal is thus to reduce TOF-MS devices in their size. Here we present a finite elements method study of a set up with reduced size that is in fact a linear ion trap, letting the ions oscillate certain times over a certain distance instead of flying one large distance. The set up works without quadrupoles etc. and employs only static fields.