Chemical Mass Shifts in a Digital Linear Ion Trap as Analytical Identity of o- , m- , and p- Xylene

Chemical mass shifts between isomeric ions of o- , m- , and p- xylene were measured using a digital linear ion trap, and the directions and values of the shifts were found to be correlated to the collision cross sections of the isomers. Both forward and reverse scans were used and the chemical shifts for each pair of isomers in scans of opposite directions were in opposite signs. Using different voltage settings (namely the voltage dividing ratio-VDR) of the ion trap allows adding high order field components in the quadrupole field and results in larger chemical mass shifts. The differential chemical mass shift which combined the shifts from forward and reverse scans doubled the amount of chemical shift, e.g., 0.077 Th between o- and p- xylene, enough for identification of the type of isomer without using an additional ion mobility spectrometer. The feature of equal and opposite chemical mass shifts also allowed to null out the chemical mass shift by calculating the mean m / z value between the two opposite scans and remove or reduce the mass error caused by chemical mass shift. Graphical Abstract ᅟ