Golf ball-assisted electrospray ionization of mass spectrometry for the determination of trace amino acids in complex samples.

During the electrospray ionization (ESI) process, ions move through a heated capillary aperture to be detected on arrival at a mass analyzer. However, the ESI process creates an ion plume, which expands into an ion cloud with an area larger than that of the heated capillary aperture, significantly contributing to an ion loss of 50% due to coulombic repulsion. The use of DC and RF fields to focus ions from the ion source into the vacuum chamber has been proposed in the literature, but the improvement of ion transmission efficiency is limited. To improve ion transmission, in this study we propose a novel method using a home-made golf ball positioned between the ion source and the inlet of the mass analyzer to hydrodynamically focus the ions passing through the golf ball. The ion plume produced by the ESI process passes through the golf ball will reduce the size of the ion cloud then be focused and most of them flowed into the mass analyzer. Therefore, the sensitivity will be improved, the aim of this investigation is to study the enhancing of the signal using golf ball-assisted electrospray ionization liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) to determine 20 trace amino acids in complex samples, including tea, urine and serum. The results showed that the analytical performance of the determination of the 20 amino acids in tea, urine and serum samples using the home-made golf ball-assisted ESI source is better than that of a commercial ESI source. The signal intensities of the 20 amino acids were enhanced by factors of 2-2700, 11-2525, and 31-342680 in oolong tea, urine and serum analyses, respectively. The precision of the proposed method ranged from 1-9%, 0.4-9% and 0.4-8% at low, medium and high concentration levels of amino acids, respectively. The home-made golf ball-assisted ESI source effectively increased the signal intensity and enhanced the ion transmission efficiency and is also an easy, convenient and economical device. This technique can be applied to the analysis of trace compounds in complex matrices.

Study of laser noises corresponding to different feedback configurations for blue-light optical pickup heads.

Based on the technology of real-time laser noise measurement which had been developed for the red-light DVD optical storage system before, this study investigates the laser noises corresponding to different feedback configurations by using the optical system of a blue-light HD-DVD optical pickup head (OPH) with the numerical aperture (NA) of 0.65 and the laser wavelength of 405 nm. It combines with a digital servo controller for dynamically measuring the blue laser noise while operated in an OPH. Experimental results show the variations of relative intensity noise (RIN) values corresponding to focusing errors, lens off-axis errors, disk rotation speeds, and laser emitting powers, respectively.