Pseudorandom time-of-flight analysis with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer

We describe the advantages of using the pseudorandom time-of-flight (TOF) technique for measuring velocity distributions together with the TOF mass spectrometric detection. The basic idea of the method is the successive measurement of abundance spectra with the TOF mass spectrometer correlated with each channel of the pseudorandom sequence. Extraction of the intensities of each mass and subsequent cross correlation with the pseudorandom sequence leads to the TOF and thus the velocity distributions. The proposed technique can substantially reduce the data acquisition time in systems for which many different reaction products are expected such as in cluster research. An illustration of the efficiency is presented using angular resolved TOF distributions for products of the reaction of sodium clusters Na-n with O-2. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.