A KINETIC-ANALYSIS OF COLLISION EXPERIMENTS IN TRIPLE QUADRUPOLE INSTRUMENTS - VALIDATION OF THE KINETIC METHOD

A kinetic analysis of collisionally induced decompositions in a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer is described. The analysis is used to ca lculate reaction probabilities for the decomposition of proton-bound d imers of amines. A modified form of the simple QET expression is used for the rate constants. With this expression for the rate constant, mo del calculations show that the reaction probabilities for competing fr agmentation reactions depend only slightly on where during passage of the collision region the parent ion is activated, and hardly at all on the velocity of the activated ion through the collision region. This simplifies the calculations of relative ion abundances. The analysis i s subsequently used to calculate the relative fragment ion abundances from decomposition of proton-bound amine dimers and this leads to a va lidation of the kinetic method.