ID/NI - 06 Dielectric Barrier Discharge Microplasma-Ionization for Liquid Chromatography / Mass Spectrometry

The coupling of liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry (LC/MS) has been established as one of the most powerful tools in analytical chemistry and has resulted in important advances especially in biomedical and biochemical research. The predominantly used interfaces are electrospray ionization (ESI) and atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI). Non-polar compounds, however, are difficult to analyze with these atmospheric pressure ionization (API) techniques due to their soft ionization mechanism. It is therefore desirable to expand the applicability of LC/MS with API techniques to the determination of rather non-polar compounds. The presented API method is based on a dielectric barrier discharge microplasma-ionization, and provides superior ionization efficiency for non-polar analytes compared to ESI, APCI and atmospheric pressure photoionization (APPI).