Please do
Right.
So you want to analyse a chemical sample- Blood, drugs drugs in blood, Oil, wee, air, paint, blah.
To find out what it's mass is, you need to be able to analyse it's behaviour when you subject it to certain conditions, so you need to get it to respond in said conditions. Molecules won't do that, Ions will so you need to
ionise your sample.
You can add or take away electrons (using filaments-guns- like in an old fashioned telly)-
electron impact or you can add or remove hydrogen ions or other species using
electrospray (charged aerosol), or derivatives,
maldi (lasers)- these are the main ionisation techniques used these days.
Now you can manipulate the charged species to see how it behaves under certain conditions-
Analysis.
You can measure the time taken to get from A to B (time of flight)
You can measure the species' behaviour in a quadratic field (quadrupole-deflectors in yer telly)
Or you can bend 'em around a corner with a chuff off magnet and see what angle they come off at (sector-momentum)
Other technologies are also available.
And then, we have some electronics to analyse the behaviour and interpret the
data for you. See- easy!
The industry has put food on the tables of a lot of families in the north west for around 60 years now, and Manchester is still there or thereabouts, at the cutting edge of the technologies involved. I'm proud of that.
I'll shut up.
