Quantification of fg-pg amounts by electron capture negative ion mass spectrometry — Parameter optimisation and practical advices

Electron capture negative ion mass spectrometry (ECNI-MS) is a very suitable and popular technique for the identification and quantification of fg-pg amounts of compounds with a sufficiently high electron affinity. Many users of the ECNI mode have faced a lot of frustrating problems due to instrument contamination and wrong recommendations concerning instrument optimisation. This article summarises 14 years of experience with ECNI-MS using a large number of different instruments. Recommendations are given concerning optimisation procedures of important parameters such as ion source pressure and temperature as well as electron energy. An ion pressure optimisation method is proposed using a gas chromatograph. ECNI-MS is very sensitive against trace amounts of contaminants in the mass spectrometer and requires very clean components in the reagent gas line. Recommendations are given concerning suitable parts. Different other contamination sources are also discussed. The construction of a simple and clean gas inlet system is presented. Furthermore, contamination-free cleaning methods for the ion source are suggested. A test method based on the detection of hexachlorobenzene in the full scan mode (m/z 34–300) is proposed. It allows to evaluate both the background level in the mass spectrometer and the overall system performance. Clean instruments should show a signal-to-noise ratio of the total ion current GC signal of at least 20:1 without applying any mass signal area reject threshold. A linearity test procedure is also suggested. It shows that the linear range of a clean and optimised instrument is at least 3 orders of magnitude in the ECNI mode.