Structures for lossless ion manipulations

[1] SLIM was developed by Richard D. Smith and coworkers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and are generally fabricated from arrays of electrodes on evenly spaced planar surfaces.

[2] In 2017, Erin S. Baker, Sandilya Garimella, Yehia Ibrahim, Richard D. Smith and Ian Webb from the Interactive Omics Group of PNNL received the R&D 100 Award for the development of SLIM.

The first SLIM were fabricated using PCB technology to demonstrate a range of simple ion manipulations in gases at low pressures (a few torr).

SLIM devices can enable complex sequences of ion separations, transfers and trapping to occur in the space between two surfaces positioned (e.g., ~4 mm apart) and each patterned with conductive electrodes.

The operating pressure for SLIM devices has initially been reported to be in the 1-10 torr range which allows ions to be effectively confined using the previously defined RF potentials.