1B-O1-1420 PDF
Application of Ion Mobility-Mass Spectrometry to the Study of Ionic Clusters
Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) has become one of the important method for chemical analysis of polyatomic molecules and molecular aggregates. Recently we studied the structure of atomic cluster ions composed of ionic bonds, such as metal oxides and alkali halides by using this technique. In this study we have examined IMS of first-row transition metal oxide cluster ions such as (FeO)n+ and (CoO)n+ in order to investigate the structural change with cluster size n. From the arrival time distributions obtained in IMS, we have deduced collision cross sections experimentally, and we have determined the ion structures by comparison with the collision cross sections obtained by calculations. As a result, we have found that transitions from two-dimensional to three-dimensional structures commonly occur around the cluster size of 6 for these metal oxide cluster ions.