Mass spectrometry--not just a structural tool: the use of guided ion beam tandem mass spectrometry to determine thermochemistry.

Guided ion beam tandem mass spectrometry has proved to be a robust tool for the measurement of thermodynamic information. Over the past twenty years, we have elucidated a number of factors necessary to make such thermochemistry accurate. Careful attention must be paid to the reduction of the raw data, ion intensities versus laboratory ion energies, to a more useful form, reaction cross sections versus relative kinetic energy. Analysis of the kinetic energy dependence of cross sections for endothermic reactions can then reveal thermodynamic data for both bimolecular and collision-induced dissociation (CID) processes. Such analyses need to include consideration of the explicit kinetic and internal energy distributions of the reactants, the effects of multiple collisions, the identity of the collision partner in CID processes, the kinetics of the reaction being studied, and competition between parallel reactions. This work provides examples illustrating the need to consider this multitude of effects along with details of the procedures developed in our group for handling each of them.