High Temperature Condensed Phase Mass Spectrometric Analysis

This program (in the 20th month as of this writing) was initiated with the goal of designing, constructing and operating a materials analysis instrument capable of obtaining a wide variety of chemical measurements on a material at high temperature. This instrument is being built around a quadrupole mass spectrometer. There are three main modes of obtaining spectra from the high temperature condensed phase material; surface ionization from the condensed phase, secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS, both static and dynamic modes) of the condensed phase, and electron impact ionization of vapor phase neutral species. The combination of the data from these three modes will allow the gleaning of chemical information concerning the nature of the chemical species present in both the condensed phase (solid or molten) and the vapor phase. The intended application is the identification of the chemical species present in materials at high temperatures