Theoretical Study of Dual-Direction Dipolar Excitation of Ions in Linear Ion Traps

Abstract

The ion enhanced activation and collision-induced dissociation (CID) by simultaneous dipolar excitation of ions in the two radial directions of linear ion trap (LIT) have been recently developed and tested by experiment. In this work, its detailed properties were further studied by theoretical simulation. The effects of some experimental parameters such as the buffer gas pressure, the dipolar excitation signal phases, power amplitudes, and frequencies on the ion trajectory and energy were carefully investigated. The results show that the ion activation energy can be significantly increased by dual-direction excitation using two identical dipolar excitation signals because of the addition of an excitation dimension and the fact that the ion motion radius related to ion kinetic energy can be greater than the field radius. The effects of higher-order field components, such as dodecapole field on the performance of this method are also revealed. They mainly cause ion motion frequency shift as ion motion amplitude increases. Because of the frequency shift, there are different optimized excitation frequencies in different LITs. At the optimized frequency, ion average energy is improved significantly with relatively few ions lost. The results show that this method can be used in different kinds of LITs such as LIT with 4-fold symmetric stretch, linear quadrupole ion trap, and standard hyperbolic LIT, which can significantly increase the ion activation energy and CID efficiency, compared with the conventional method.

Keywords: Dual-direction dipolar excitation; Higher-order fields; Ion activation; Linear ion trap; Two identical excitation signals.