A new magnetron based gas aggregation source of metal nanoclusters coupled to a double time-of-flight mass spectrometer system

A new magnetron based gas-aggregation source for continuous production of metal nanoclusters has been built and coupled to a double time-of-flight mass spectrometer system. The capability of the source to produce neutral, positive, and negative nanoclusters within one production cycle, particularly under the same optimized experimental conditions, has been tested. The source performs steadily for continuous long operations and has high beam intensity that would be preferable for size selective measurements in gas phase on individual nanoclusters. This paper describes on the instrumentation of the integrated complete experimental setup for gas-phase measurement on nanoclusters including the source. It reports on the production of copper nanoclusters using the source. Mass abundances of neutral and charged clusters have been investigated and the results are discussed with respect to reported results using various other types of sources. The experimental isotopic distributions of 63Cu versus 65Cu within individual cluster mass peaks have been derived and compared to corresponding theoretical profiles.