Technical data

80 Agilent 6200 Series TOF and 6500 Series Q-TOF LC/MS System Concepts Guide
3 Methods with Acquisition Parameters
TOF and Q-TOF acquisition parameters
MS mode
In this mode the Q-TOF instrument behaves solely as a TOF
instrument with no quad isolation applied. You specify the mass
range and the acquisition rate and time to collect spectra.
Transients vs. mass range The mass spectrum resulting from
a single pulse of voltage applied to the ion pulser is called
a transient. The recorded Mass Spectrum is, in reality, a result
of the application of multiple pulses to the ion pulser and
a summation of lower signal mass spectra, or transients.
(Figure 35)
For analyses that require one Mass Spectrum or scan per
second, the Agilent TOF and Q-TOF LC/MS software sums
10,000 transients before transferring the data from the
instrument back to the host computer to be written to disk. If
the target application involves high speed chromatography and
requires faster scanning, you can reduce the number of
transients per scan to increase the scans per second.
The length of transients is the time the system is allowed to
collect data for the transient in nanoseconds. On the Agilent
TOF and Q-TOF LC/MS, three mass range modes are available:
• Low (1,700 m/z)
• Standard (3,200 m/z)
• High (20,000 m/z) - The mass range of 20,000 m/z is available
for Accurate-Mass TOF and Q-TOF instruments.
Figure 34 MS (Seg) Mode parameters in the Acquisition tab