Yasuhide Naito
Associate Professor, The Graduate School for the Creation of
New Photonics Industries

　Imaging mass spectrometry is a vital analytical technique for a variety of material surfaces, on which the identification and localization of atomic and/or molecular species can be obtained simultaneously; it may facilitate clarifying unknown phenomena in a wide range of research fields from semiconductor physics to life science. This project actualizes a novel ultrafast microscopic imaging mass spectrometry, by constructing instruments that can peel off the surface of a small exposure area with a focused desorption laser beam, subsequently separate desorbed ions according to their mass to charge ratios with a perfect focusing time-of-flight ion optics, then take magnified optical images of separated ion packets coming to a imaging detector one after another, whose shapes conserve the original distributions of those species on the material surface.