18 Agilent 6400 Series Triple Quad LC/MS Concepts Guide
2 Inner Workings – Triple Quadrupole MS versus Single Quadrupole MS
How a single quadrupole mass spectrometer works
Single quadrupole: Full Scan MS
In a full MS scan, the quadrupole serves as a mass filter over
time, and a scan is carried out by stepping through increasing
DC and RF voltages. This provides filtering through the
corresponding m/z values across a mass spectrum. See Figure 4.
Figure 4 Single quadrupole: Full scan MS
The full scan MS mode is less sensitive because the duty cycle
for each m/z is considerably less than 100%. The quadrupole
mass analyzer scans sequentially, passing each m/z in the
selected mass range to the detector.
A full scan MS is still a useful mode of operation because it
shows all of the ions that are being formed in the ion source.
This is useful for developing SIM acquisitions but also alerts
analysts to other compounds co-eluting with compounds of
interest.
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