Ion/surface collisions: An alternative to gas-phase collisional activation in mass spectrometry

Abstract

Collisions of ions at solid surfaces result in a number of phenomena, of which surface-induced dissociation (SID) is the most important. SID has been shown to be a viable alternative to collision-induced dissociation (CID) in the gas phase as a method for ion activation and fragmentation in mass spectrometry. In particular, SID exhibits the following major characteristics (i) it enables efficient translational to internal energy conversion, which makes possible the fragmentation of very large compounds, such as biomolecules, (ii) the collision energy is easily controlled by controlling the voltage difference between the ion source and the target, (iii) ion/surface reactive collisions occur simultaneously with dissociation, which provides an additional aid in structure characterization, (iv) the elimination of collision gas eliminates the danger of loss of instrument performance (e.g., resolution). Instrumentation, solid targets and applications of surface-induced dissociation are reviewed.