Superconducting Strip Ion Detectors for Time-of-flight Mass Spectrometer

Superconducting detectors are promising as ion detectors for time-of-flight mass spectrometers (TOF MS). They can achieve mass-independent detection efficiency even for macromolecular bombardments, because output signals are produced through the deposited kinetic energy at ion impact instead of secondary electron emission that is the ion detection mechanism of conventional microchannel plate (MCP) detectors or secondary electron multipliers (SEM). Among the superconducting detectors, the superconducting strip ion detectors (SSIDs), which consist of several hundreds of superconducting lines with a width of a few hundreds nm and a thickness of a few tens of nm, have a fast response time of less than 1 ns. Inherently, the response time of SSIDs is determined by kinetic inductance, so that it was difficult to realize a fast SSID with a large detection area. However, we succeeded in realizing the detector size up to without response time degradation by using a parallel configuration.