Dithered multi-pulsing and non-parametric statistical inference algorithm for time-of-flight mass spectrometry

Time-of-flight mass spectrometers have classically been limited in the maximum ion pulser firing rate by the flight time of the slowest analyte ion present. This paper describes a new randomly dithered ion pulser firing scheme that operates in conjunction with a non- parametric iterated statistical inference algorithm, inspired by the Belief Propagation algorithm, to resolve the multiple time-of-flight aliases that result for firing rates above this classical limit. This algorithm readily exploits available a priori information and several acceleration techniques are applicable. Simulations of this method with a 10x firing rate increases show excellent fidelity with classically measured spectrums.