Carbon nanotube thin films as photoemissive ionization source

Photoemissive ionization source is a kind of stable, sensitive, selective, and reliable ionization source for ion mobility spectrometry, which can find a wide range of applications such as security checking, air and food quality monitoring. State-of-the-art ion source adopts a thin gold film, which is costly and suffered from long term stability. There is a continuous effort to search stable low cost photoemissive thin film materials. In this article, we demonstrate an alternative type of thin film ion source based on single wall carbon nanotube, which demonstrates comparable ion signals to that from the gold film, and shows huge potential for further improvement in the near future.