Unimolecular Ion Decomposition (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Unimolecular ion decomposition is the fragmentation of a gas phase ion in a reaction with a molecularity of one. Ions with sufficient internal energy may fragment in a mass spectrometer, which in some cases may degrade the mass spectrometer performance, but in other cases, such as tandem mass spectrometry, the fragmentation can reveal information about the structure of the ion.A Wahrhaftig diagram illustrates the relative contributions in unimolecular ion decomposition of direct fragmentation and fragmentation following rearrangement. The x-axis of the digram represents the internal energy of the ion. The lower part of the diagram shows the logarithm of the rate constant k for unimolecular dissociation whereas the upper portion of the diagram indicates the probability of forming a particular product ion.