History of mass measurements in time-of-flight mass analyzers

Time-of-flight mass analyzers have been developed since the 1950s, but there was a 30 year period during which new developments were slow. However, in the 1980s new ideas were proposed for the mass analysis of high energy ions, allowing an overview of the masses of most existing nuclei, and for low energy ions a fast and accurate identification of large molecules became possible. Since the 1990s especially multi-pass energy-isochronous time-of-flight mass analyzers have been developed for high as well as for low energy ions. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.