There are so many interesting chemical frontiers that the scientific community can research, but isolating species of particular interest in order to investigate it often limits the types of characterization the species is compatible with. The phase, polarity, and sensitivity of a compound complicate the investigations of it's reactivity, solvent effects, mechanisms, kinetics, and spectroscopic profile. Imagine a way to completely characterize a molecule, regardless of it's stickiness or volatility, efficiently, and in such a way that generates little to no waste.

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Fortunately, we do not have to imagine. Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometry has been used by many to study the intrinsic reactivity of species from every major field of chemistry, including small organic molecules, large repeating polyers, inorganic clusters,  multi-ligated complexes, biochemical peptides, nucleotides, and more! Using the diverse set of flavors of ionization methods and trapping techniques, ions of any kind can be generated and studied with state-of-the art precision. 

 

But Mass Spectrometry is not simply limited to measuring the mass/charge ratio of an ion. The incredible capabilities of a tandem mass spectrometer allow the ion to be isolated and fragmented several times, up to a theoretical limit. This not only provides a means of characterizing the ions (different ions fragment differently) but it also provides a means of generating novel ions which could not be synthesized outside the mass spectrometer. 

 

These novel ions, while unique to the ion-trap environment, provide the opportunity to explore the elements' chemistry in an unprecedented way! The simple ions can be the subjects of ion-molecule reactions, exhibiting the behavior of a atom or molecule in a chemical environment simply not available to bench-top experiments. 

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But the advantages don't stop there. The versatile nature of the mass spectrometer allows the instrument to be coupled to a variety of spectroscopic experiments, allowing these novel ions to be characterized with every wavelength of light available to the scientific community. By being clever, researchers set out to generate an ion of a unique nature and completely characterize it's reactivity as well as it's vibrational and electronic structures. 

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Thus, it is our goal to help map out the intrinsic chemical nature of species of interest to better inform the bench-top chemical community of the reactivity of their systems. After all, how can we know the role of solvent if we are not able to remove it? Using a variety of flavors of ion-trap mass spectrometry, we seek to generate novel ions from across the chemical field, and probe their intrinsic chemistry using fragmentation, ion-molecule reactions, computational modeling, and spectroscopy. 

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