Development of instrumentation

A central aspect of our work is the development of advanced instrumentation. Photoabsorption and collision studies on complex molecules are inherently challenging due to the difficulty of transferring intact systems into the gas phase. To address this, we employ electrospray ionization to generate protonated and deprotonated molecular ions, which are subsequently manipulated using radiofrequency techniques for mass selection and, where applicable, conformer selection via ion-mobility methods. Because the resulting molecular targets are extremely dilute and interaction cross sections—such as for X-ray absorption—are extremely small, the processes of interest are very rare events. Ion trapping techniques are therefore essential, enabling the accumulation and controlled interrogation of these systems.