Critical assessment: Use of supersonic jet spectrometry for complex mixture analysis (IUPAC Technical Report)

Abstract

When cooled to a temperature of a few K using supersonic jet expansion into a vacuum, a molecule exists in the lowest vibrational level of the ground electronic state and is isolated at collision-free conditions. The absorption or excitation/fluorescence spectrum is then greatly simplified, when transitions occur from this single vibrational level to a limited number of vibrational levels in the excited electronic state. This method, called supersonic jet spectrometry, is a powerful analytical technique because of its high selectivity, since the chemical species can be accurately identified and selectively quantified using the sharp spectral features even for large molecules. Supersonic jet spectrometry has distinct advantages over other low-temperature spectrometries, in that it can be combined with gas-phase separation and detection techniques such as chromatography or mass spectrometry. Therefore, this spectrometric technique can be used as a versatile analytical means, not only for basic research on pure substances, but also for practical trace analysis of chemical species in multicomponent samples (e.g., in biological monitoring or in environmental monitoring).