Patent ID: 8633436

Claim:
A method for acquiring spectrometric data from ions, the method comprising: injecting a plurality of ion packets sequentially into an ion mobility (IM) drift tube at a multiplexed injection rate, such that at least two ion packets are present in the IM drift tube at the same time; separating ions in each ion packet according to IM as the ions drift through the IM drift tube; transmitting the ion packets into a pulser of a time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometer; extracting a plurality of new ion packets sequentially from the pulser into a flight tube of the TOF mass spectrometer, wherein extraction is performed at a multiplexed extraction rate such that more than one extracted ion packet is produced from the same ion packet transmitted into the pulser, and at least two extracted ion packets are present in the flight tube at the same time; separating ions in each extracted ion packet according to TOF as the ions drift through the flight tube; detecting ions as the ions arrive at a detector from the flight tube; and before detecting the ions, selecting ions only of a specific m/z range, wherein each ion packet in the flight tube comprises ions of the same selected m/z range as the ions of the other ion packets, and overlap between sequential ion packets in the flight tube is minimized.