Elastic scattering induced peak tails in time-of-flight mass spectra

Elastic scattering of an ion packet during its flight from source to detector generates peak tails on the high mass side in linear field-free space time-of-flight mass spectrometers, symmetrical, on both sides in reflectrons. The shape of these tails was calculated as a function of the elastic scattering cross section, the residual gas pressure and the detector size for linear drift space and symmetric reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometers. A numerical example shows an abundance sensitivity several orders of magnitude better for a linear time-of-flight mass spectrometer than for a magnetic static deflector.