Figure 7.

The mass resolving power of a linear time‐of‐flight (TOF) mass analyzer is controlled by variances in the timing, spatial distribution, and kinetic energy spread of ions formed within the source region and transmitted into the analyzer. However, the implementation of an ionization source capable of ultrafast pulsing (eg, femtosecond laser) can attenuate temporal variances in ion formation, and one or more ion mirrors (eg, reflectrons) can normalize the spread in kinetic energies, together improving the achievable mass resolving power of advanced time‐of‐flight mass spectrometer (TOFMS) systems