Spiral Orbit Time of Flight Mass Spectrometer.

A new design of TOF mass spectrometer with spiral orbit is proposed. By the suitable arrangement of electric sector fields and free spaces, ion optical systems with spiral orbit are found. The long orbit has no overlapping part in comparison with the multi-turn system. The ion path length of more than 3 m is possible to obtain in a very small geometrical space of only 20 cm diameter. The systems have excellent focusing nature in both time and space.