A New Time-of-Flight Instrument for SIMS and Its Application to Organic Compounds

For the e/m-analysis of secondary ions, different types of mass spectrometers with considerable differences concerning their mass range, their transmission and their dynamic range, have been applied. An important aspect which determines the choice of an appropriate mass analyzer in SIMS is the quantity of sample material that is available. It determines the total number of secondary ions that can be produced. This may be an extremely low number, if e.g. in static SIMS, only a fraction of one monolayer in the bombarded target area of some 0.01 cm2 is allowed to be sputtered during an experiment [1].