Analysis of the mercury induced fragmentation of certain n-alkanes in pulsed ion mobility spectrometry with Gold's Algorithm

Ion mobility is a well know technique offering the analysis of gaseous substances in e.g. environmental monitoring applications. The advantages are a portable instrument size, very high sensitivity in the ppbv range, fast response time in the range of a few seconds, but limited selectivity due to its relatively low resolving power. Typically, an ion mobility spectrum has maximum two peaks per analyte if dimer formation takes place; often only one peak per analyte is observable. Normally, analyte fragmentation is not observed. However, in a previous study, we reported strong fragmentation of n-decane and n-undecane when mercury is present in the device. In this paper, we employed de-convolution with help of Gold's Algorithm to reduce the peak width in these spectra with the goal to obtain further information regarding this fragmentation.