A space focused ion time of flight mass spectrometer, and spectroscopy of hydrogen chloride, deuterium chloride, and hydrogen sulfide at "hard" x-ray energies

David Linnemann Hansen, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Abstract

A space-focused ion time-of-flight mass spectrometer was used to study the relaxation dynamics of HCl, DCl, and H{dollar}\sb2{dollar}S following the excitation of a K-shell electron using synchrotron radiation. On resonance, fragmentation of the molecule involving neutral dissociation of hydrogen was found to be a significant decay channel, thus raising questions of how effectively dissociation competes with Auger decay in the relaxation process. In addition, a space-focused ion time-of-flight mass spectrometer was constructed to be optimized for use at the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley, California. Peaks with less than 1 ns full-width at half-maximum have been observed.