A method for the study of correlated events in time-of-flight mass-spectrometry and its application to fission-fragment induced desorption
- For experiments on fission-fragment induced desorption the detection of significant correlations between desorbed ions has been reported [1]. In this paper the method for the detection and quantitative description of these correlations will be described. The statistics of the desorption-process leads to equations for mass-line intensities of ion spectra. Using a time-to-amplitude-converter for flight-time measurements these intensities depend on interdependences of different ions desorbed by the same fission-fragment. The equations allow the computation of correlationcoefficients whose interdependence with desorption probabilities of the respective ions can be shown in Venn-diagrams. Results are given and an interpretation is suggested for fission-fragment desorbed thiamine molecular and fragment ions.