Over the last decades, mass spectrometry has developed into an essential tool for science and a world market worth several billion dollars.
Mass spectroscopy has become a tool for all analytical sciences from fundamental physics, over applied chemistry, biology, pharmacy and clinical medicine to geology and planetary research.
Two grand challenges have, however, remained open throughout all these years:
the detection of slow macromolecular ions with low charge and the analysis of neutral massive macromolecules in the gas phase.
Mass spectrometers rely on the capability to prepare, select and detect molecular ions and many instruments detect these ions via secondary electron multiplication (SEM).
It has been a notorious challenge to efficiently detect massive biopolymers because SEM requires ions at high impact velocities.
Novel applications can therefore profit form detectors that can report the presence of particles with high mass-to-charge ratio and low energy, efficiently.
Moreover, established methods usually do not detect or analyze neutral macromolecular beams.
A novel detector, that provides this feature, can become open a new window for research and technology.
This detector should have a high spatial and temporal resolution, it should have a high detection quanutm yield even for low particle energies independent of the particle composition, and it should be scalable to many pixels - to develop a novel camera.
Protein analysis often is interested in conformations, which also depend on the molecular charge state. Most mass spectrometers handle highly charged molecules, and
new opportunities can open for charge-reduced or even neutral species in high vacuum.
Controlling the charge state of complex biomolecuar systems has been a grand challenge - and a great goal. Important progress hinges on the capability to control the charge softly and in high vacuum.
The synthesis of specific tags, that can be generically bound to complex proteins and cleaved off by laser light at a well defined position and time, addresses this challenge.
Neutral biomolecules in high vacuum have been hardly accessible so far. Novel sources and detectors now open research into this vast material class.
