In a series of posts, we are going to talk about Mass Spectrometry.

1. Introduction-The dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tions and the Elec­tron Impact process
2. What types of mass ana­lyz­ers are there?
3. What type of detec­tors are there?
4. What types of analy­sis can be done?
5. How do you read the output?
6. How do they come to a qual­i­ta­tive mea­sure using software?
7. How do they quan­ti­tate the results?
8. Do you need chro­matog­ra­phy if you are using Mass Spectrometry?
9. Other top­ics of inter­est about GC-MS

In this post, we look at the dif­fer­ent types of detec­tors are used. Widely used detec­tors include:  elec­tron mul­ti­plier, dyn­ode, pho­to­di­ode and multi-channel plate. There is a whole lot of physics as to how this all works, but as inter­est­ing as it is, it is not par­tic­u­larly impor­tant for us to know or under­stand as that there is a difference.

Less and less ana­lyte is reach­ing the detec­tor along this process. You lose ana­lyte in the injec­tor port if a split injec­tor is used. Some is lost in the trans­fer. Some is lost in the source. A lot is lost in the mass ana­lyzer. So, in this final step, we typ­i­cally find an elec­tron mul­ti­plier. A elec­tron mul­ti­plier is used to try to com­pen­sate for this loss and in doing so there is con­sid­er­able ampli­fi­ca­tion to get a signal.

In our next post, we will exam­ine the ques­tion: “What types of analy­sis can be done?”