Superconducting strip-lines for mass spectrometry

The emerging life sciences (genomics, proteomics...) require to the modern time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF-MS) the capability to identify and quantify massive macromolecules with masses larger than 100 kDa. The detectors commonly used in TOF-MS have both sensitive area of square centimeters for a good geometric efficiency and a sub-nanosecond response time for a small mass resolution. Anyway they suffer a serious loss in detection efficiency for masses above 4 kDa up to become completely insensitive for values of about 100 kDa, limiting the effectiveness of the TOF-MS technique. Here, I show how an innovative class of detectors, superconducting strip-line detectors (SSLDs), allows a mass independent detection efficiency and unprecedented performances respect to the other superconducting detectors, in terms of both sub-nanosecond response time and large coverage area, when revealing keV molecules. All the aspects concerning the fabrication technology of superconducting thin films and nano-patterning by electron beam lithography for the SSLDs realization as well their characterization in a TOF-MS are treated in this book. This book is integrally extracted by my PhD thesis.

Autorentext

Alessandro Casaburi received the Graduation in Physics cum laude from the University of Napoli "Federcio II" in the 2002 and the Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Salerno in 2010. He has a Postdoctoral fellow at CNR Cybernetics Institute of Pozzuoli (Italy). Since 2006 He has been working on superconducting quantum radiation detectors.