Paul Trap Mass Spectometer Developed in the Mass Spectometry Laboratory

The motivation of this technical report is to describe the design and provide fabrication details of the Paul trap mass spectrometer that has been built in our laboratory. This technical report gives both the theory of ion trapping in Paul trap mass spectrometers and the technical specifications of mechanical assembly, vacuum chamber and other electronic subsystems associated with our laboratory’s Paul trap mass spectrometer. Section 2 gives the theory of the ion trap mass spectrometry including development of equations of ion motion and the conditions required for the ions to have stable trajectories inside the trap. Section 3 provides the technical specifications of our trap electrodes, electronic subsystems including constant current source, gating power supply, extraction power supply, high voltage dc power supply, RF signal generator as well as the vacuum system and graphical user interface are presented. Section 4 presents a few mass spectra to demonstrate the performance our mass spectrometer. Appendix 1 gives the detailed orcad layouts of all the electronic circuits associated with the Paul trap mass spectrometer and the technical data related to the National Instruments data acquisition device PCI-MIO-16-E-1 is given in Appendix 2. At the end of the report a few important and pertinent references are provided