K. Whalen et al., ION DISSOCIATION REACTIONS INDUCED IN A HIGH-PRESSURE QUADRUPOLE COLLISION CELL, Rapid communications in mass spectrometry, 9(14), 1995, pp. 1366-1375
This work concerns a new high-pressure quadrupole collision cell, desi
gned for triple-quadrupole mass spectrometers, This new collision cell
operates at pressures up to 10 mTorr, an order of magnitude higher th
an conventional cells of this type. Previous investigations have conce
ntrated upon the significant increases in transmission efficiency and
in resolving power for fragment ions which result from the use of this
new design, The present work reports an investigation into the nature
of the dissociation reactions which can be induced by collisions in t
his high-pressure cell, Charge-site-remote fragmentations of a simple
precursor ion were chosen as a test case, and were found to be observa
ble at laboratory collision energies lower by a factor of 4-5 than tho
se found previously to be necessary when using conventional low-pressu
re quadrupole collision cells, It was also shown that the charge-site-
remote reactions were accompanied by the mixed-site-fragmentation reac
tions described by Tuinman and Cook (J. Arm. Soc. Mass Spectrom. Vol.
1, p. 85 (1989)), Ionization of collision gas was observed in the case
of xenon, Efforts to observe charge-site-remote fragmentations of pep
tide ions were marginally successful. Highly basic peptides, which hav
e been problematic for sequencing by low-energy tandem mass spectromet
ry, did not yield useful fragment-ion spectra in the new cell, The fra
gmentation behaviour of protonated Leu-enkephalin, for which fragmenta
tion pathways have been thoroughly studied previously, suggested that
the observed spectra reflected integration of the fragmentation kineti
cs over a considerably longer time, thus involving many more reaction
steps, These combined observations are considered in terms of a qualit
ative model based on a rapid decrease of ion kinetic energy during pas
sage through the cell, with much longer residence times than for conve
ntional quadrupole cells.