Quadrupole ion trap mass spectrometry: a view at the turn of the century

A personal account of the quadrupole ion trap researches carried out in my laboratory and in collaboration with other laboratories. This account comme nces with the announcement, in 1983, of the first commercially available io n trap detector, manufactured by Finnigan MAT, and continues to the present day. Much of the ion trap mass spectrometry research that took place durin g the period following this announcement until 1994 has been discussed in d etail in three volumes entitled Practical Aspects of Ion Trap Mass Spectrom etry that were published in 1995. Except for those researches that impinged directly on our work during this period, no discussion of the contents of these three volumes is repeated here. The ion trap literature from 1994 to the present has been reviewed selectively so as to convey to the reader the dynamic nature of ion trap mass spectrometry and the wide variety of its a pplication. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V.