Book of Abstracts Book of Abstracts - Universität Konstanz

Molecular Beams of Organic Molecules
Tim Krause, Adnan Sarfraz, Wolfgang Christen
Institut für Chemie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 12489 Berlin, Germany
A - 11
The transfer of non-volatile or thermally unstable molecules into the gas phase is of utmost
importance for a variety of applications such as analytical mass spectrometry, optical spectroscopy,
or the epitaxial growth of thin films. One possible method is the expansion of supercritical
solutions into a molecular beam. Here the key idea is to dissolve the substance at high
pressure, exploiting the supercritical fluid's solvent power, and precipitate it by expansion.
Extending our previous work on caffeine [1] and small molecules (vitamin K3, phenylalanine
tertbutylester) [2] we report the successful expansion of several molecules of biological interest
in supercritical CO2 at temperatures of only 310-315 K, and accompanying detection using mass
spectrometry.
References
[1] W. Christen, S. Geggier, S. Grigorenko, K. Rademann, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 75, 5048 (2004).
[2] W. Christen, T. Krause, H. Noack, A. Sarfraz, J. Chem. Phys., to be submitted.
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