A spontaneous desorption‐based polyatomic ion source

We describe an ion source based on the spontaneous desorption process. The production, acceleration, and separation processes allow for the production of keV energy polyatomic ions while maintaining a high signal‐to‐background ratio. Both atomic and polyatomic ions with up to 37 keV energy were generated. Because the spontaneous desorption process is naturally pulsed, the ion source was attached to a dual time‐of‐flight mass spectrometer for secondary ion mass spectrometry experiments. In this article, we describe the design of both the polyatomic ion source and the mass spectrometer.