Mass spectrometry in your hand

If you're out in the field doing environmental testing, food checks, forensic work, or other chemical analysis, mass spectrometry is an extremely accurate detection tool with one huge drawback:

You can lose days in sending samples back to the lab for analysis. MIT researchers now have developed technologies that promise to enable mass spectrometers that are handheld and much more inexpensive than today's lab systems.

"The opportunity in mass spectrometers is to bring the analytical power of brick and mortar laboratories into the field," says MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) Principal Research Scientist Luis Velásquez-García. "We think we could make something the size of a smartphone that does the same analyses as much larger systems without sacrificing performance, and at a fraction of the cost. This will allow us to put mass spectrometry in many places where it can't be done now."

Velásquez-García and other researchers at MIT's MTL have engineered nanoscale versions of key components for mass spectrometry—most notably, ionizing sources for liquids and gases, a "quadrupole" that sorts out the chemical compounds, and a chip-scale vacuum pump—as well as technologies for mass production of these components.

Made from arrays of self-aligned nanoscale conical tips, the low-voltage miniaturized gas ionizer can work at vacuum pressures that are orders of magnitude higher than today's commercial systems, making ion production greatly more efficient and minimizing requirements for vacuum pumping, Velásquez-García says.