Does the mass spectrometer collect quantitative or qualitative results?
The most common use of MS is to determine the parent ion and breakdown pattern of a molecule of unknown composition. For this purpose it is a qualitative tool: it doesn’t matter how much of the sample is injected into the MS it will still give the parent ion. But MS can indeed be made to be an extremely accurate analytical technique. If a solution is vaporized into its elements and injected into the MS then the intensity of the element parent ion peak is proportional to the initial concentration of that element. This can be determined by comparing the spectrum to known standards. But it goes further than that as you can determine many elements in the sample essentially simultaneously. It is not uncommon to determine the conc of say 20 metals in a drinking water sample at the same time, and do 100 such samples in an overnight run. The technique is called ICP-MS: inductively-coupled-plasma mass-spectrometry.[1] Plasmas are made by heating the samples with microwaves; as I recall plasma t
