I took apart one of our old instruments last week:
It a device that reflects ions through a giant vacuum chamber. The time it takes for those ions to travel through its very controlled electromagnetic field is proportional to their mass-to-charge ratio. So with a metal screen (2nd to last picture in top comment) you can detect how many ions came through and calculate how long it took to see them relative to an initial electromagnetic pulse that flings them through the chamber.
It's fascinating how much medical imagining and space plasma imaging techniques have in common. What do you use for your signal multiplication scheme? Channel Electron Multiplier? Avalanche Photodiode?
Ah, you've just gone past my physics knowledge right there. I believe the instrument above is a channel electron multiplier, but it looks like our newer one uses a differential amplifier
Are you my professor? I'm in the middle of a Fourier analysis of the power spectrum radiated by a charge trapped in a magnetic field (for a velocity much less than the speed of light, aka cyclotron radiation, the relativistic case being synchrotron radiation). It's analogous to the Orbitrap's electric field trapping mechanism, those calculations were so last homework set. I've just stumbled (and rather stupidly) into a scenario where a few sentences led to wedding math concepts with the utility of code to tease out the charge/mass ratio using this detection scheme. Thanks man.
Highly doubtful, given I work in a bio lab and it sounds like you're into physics. That sounds crazy though, I think the least intuitive thing about the orbitraps is to me that it's not the frequency of spinning around the trap that's used for m/z calculations, but the frequency of oscillating from one end of the trap to the other. It blew my mind when I first learned that.Are you my professor?
To beat this horse dead: I found the SIMION simulation of the "quadro logarithmic potential", which is what causes the bouncing you've brought up. It's basically using electric potential(/field) geometry of the inner spindle to trap the particles in such a way that you've dictated all variation in their horizontal movements (in terms of manyyyy cycles per second) to be only dependent on mass/charge. So I was slightly wrong about the mechanics, thank you. But then yeah, they'll emit radiation, which you can model as one dipole moment for each particle oscillating in the plane formed by your viewing angle and the Orbitrap's axis of symmetry. Anyway, biophysics is great, I'm just such a sucker for space.
I didn't either before ~15 months ago, but as with most research topics, when you're in a lab you're surrounded by experts (i.e. my adviser built one of these for his PhD) and learn about how they work pretty quickly. If you have a high-school-level of physics, you can pick up on things like "magnetic fields move charged molecules" even if you don't know the physics-PhD-level equations to describe those movements or the MechE-PhD-level skills to machine one yourself.