Mass Spectrometry: A Boon to Nuclear Industry

Mass spectrometry is analytical instrument which has been used for more than a century with its initial work on mass charge ratio being carried out by W. Wien, J.J. Thomson, and other physicists [1]. Mass Spectroscopy is an analytical laboratory technique to separate the components of a sample by their mass. The sample is vaporized into a gas and then ionized. The ions are then accelerated through a potential difference and focused into a beam. The ion beam passes through a magnetic field which bends the charged stream. Lighter components or components with more ionic charge will deflect in the field more than heavier or less charged components. A detector counts the number of ions at different deflections and the data can be plotted as a ‘spectrum’ of different masses. Therefore it is clear that mass spectrometer performs a simple measurement that of mass. The earlier work in the measurement of mass had led to the discovery of isotopes and it was in the 1930s that these measurements were correlated to the chemical structures and therefore were used extensively for biological applications for the characterization of natural products. Further progress in the field of mass spectrometry including isotopic labeling methods, hyphenated techniques and softer ionization methods made it an ideal tool for the analysis of macromolecules [2]. With the various fields that employ mass spectrometry growing in number, nuclear industry is also an important area wherein applications of mass spectrometry exist.