Experimental studies of space charge effects in multireflecting time-of-flight mass spectrometers

In the multireflecting time-of-flight instrument with an ion trap source, the ion packet may contain up to 10^4- 10^5 ions. There are experimentally observed effects of space charge including saturation of ion intensity, spread and shift of ion peaks. In the ion source with orthogonal ion acceleration and accumulation, the packets contain under 10^4 ions and space charge effects are barely distinguishable on the top of effects of detector saturation. Presently to obtain high mass accuracy in the 1 ppm range, the ion beam intensity should be under 10^6-10^7 ions per peak per second, being mostly limited by detector effects.