Is particle beam an up-to-date LC-MS interface? State of the art and perspectives.

The particle beam liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry interface, developed more than ten years ago, has withstood the assault of several new soft ionization-based interfaces, and it is still largely used worldwide. The particle beam has widened the possibility for many HPLC-amenable compounds to be ionized under electron ionization conditions without any appreciable thermal degradation. This feature is not of secondary importance in several "small" molecules applications, where the analytes can be easily identified and their spectra matched with those collected in literature. The task of separating any solute from a liquid mobile phase is carried out very efficiently by the particle beam interface, and the only real limitation is found at the moment of the solute vaporization in the ion source; therefore, the principle of particle formation for sample transfer into a mass spectrometer could be extended profitably to other ionization techniques. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.