Fast translational thermalization of extreme disequilibrium induced by cluster impact

Experimental and theoretical investigation of overall energy deposition in surface-induced unfolding of protein ions

Recent advances in native mass spectrometry have enabled its use to probe the structure of and interactions within biomolecular complexes. Surface-induced dissociation, in which inter- and intramolecular interactions are disrupted following an energetic ion-surface collision, is a method that can directly interrogate the topology of protein complexes. However, a quantitative relationship between the ion kinetic energy at the moment of surface collision and the internal energy deposited into the ion has not yet been established for proteins. The factors affecting energy deposition in surface-induced unfolding (SIU) of protein monomers were investigated and a calibration relating laboratory-frame kinetic energy to internal energy developed. Protein monomers were unfolded by SIU and by collision-induced unfolding (CIU). CIU and SIU cause proteins to undergo the same unfolding transitions at different values of laboratory-frame kinetic energy. There is a strong correlation between the SIU and CIU energies, demonstrating that SIU, like CIU, can largely be understood as a thermal process. The change in internal energy in CIU was modeled using a Monte Carlo approach and theory. Computed values of the overall efficiency were found to be approximately 25% and used to rescale the CIU energy axis and relate nominal SIU energies to internal energy. The energy deposition efficiency in SIU increases with mass and kinetic energy from a low of ∼20% to a high of ∼68%, indicating that the effective mass of the surface increases along with the mass of the ion. The effect of ion structure on energy deposition was probed using multiple stages of ion activation. Energy deposition in SIU strongly depends on structure, decreasing as the protein is elongated, due to decreased effective protein-surface collisional cross section and increased transfer to rotational modes.

A comparative study of cluster-surface collisions: Molecular-dynamics simulations of (H2O)1000 and (SO2)1000

A classical molecular-dynamics study of (H2O)1000 and (SO2)1000 clusters impacting with velocities between 6 x 10(2) and 8 x 10(3) ms at normal incidence on a repulsive target is presented. Using the ratio of total kinetic energy to total binding energy of the cluster as a scaling parameter, a general description of the fragmentation dynamics as well as the final fragment size distributions is achieved for the different systems. With increasing ratio, the angular distribution of the emitted monomers rapidly shifts from isotropic to anisotropic. At the highest investigated velocities, a tendency to recover more isotropic distributions is observed. Comparable transient compression of the impacting cluster is reached, on the other hand, for the same, unscaled collision velocities in both systems. For both H2O and SO2 the obtained internal temperatures of the cluster fragments are found to be independent of impact energy and close to the boiling temperature of the respective systems.

Mechanical Simulation of the Pressure and the Relaxation to Thermal Equilibrium of a Hot and Dense Rare Gas Cluster

A cold atomic cluster can be very rapidly heated and compressed by a hypersonic impact at a hard surface. The impact can be simulated by computing a classical trajectory for the motion of the atoms. By suddenly confining the hot and dense cluster within a rigid container, it is possible to monitor the time evolution of the force acting on the faces of the container. It is found that the pressure computed this way very rapidly decays to a time-independent value. After a somewhat longer time, this value reproduces the value for the pressure computed as the sum of the kinetic and internal pressures. This agreement is expected for a system in equilibrium. These observations support the conclusion that there is a fast relaxation to thermal equilibrium in these essentially hard-sphere systems. The deviation from equilibrium is primarily due to the propagation of shock waves within the cluster. The equilibrium pressure can reach up to the megabar range.

A mechanical representation of entropy for a large finite system

The temporal evolution of the entropy of a mechanical system as described by a single trajectory is computed using the Clausius [Philos. Mag. 40, 122 (1868)] equality. This requires computing the maximal work that can be done by the system and comparing it to the actual work performed. A single trajectory suffices to determine the entropy when it is "typical," meaning that average values of mechanical variables will not be different when computed using trajectories with different initial conditions. The results are illustrated for small rare gas clusters heated and compressed by an impact at a hard surface.

Evanescent high pressure during hypersonic cluster-surface impact characterized by the virial theorem

Matter under extreme conditions can be generated by a collision of a hypersonic cluster with a surface. The ultra-high-pressure interlude lasts only briefly from the impact until the cluster shatters. We discuss the theoretical characterization of the pressure using the virial theorem and develop a constrained molecular-dynamics procedure to compute it. The simulations show that for rare-gas clusters the pressures reach the megabar range. The contribution to the pressure from momentum transfer is comparable in magnitude and is of the same sign as that ("the internal pressure") due to repulsive interatomic forces. The scaling of the pressure with the reduced mechanical variables is derived and validated with reference to the simulations.

Surface-induced dissociation of peptide ions: kinetics and dynamics

Kinetics and dynamics studies have been carried out for the surface-induced dissociation (SID) of a set of model peptides utilizing a specially designed electrospray ionization Fourier Transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer in which mass-selected and vibrationally relaxed ions are collided on a orthogonally-mounted fluorinated self-assembled monolayer on Au [111] crystal. The sampling time in this apparatus can be varied from hundreds of microseconds to tens of seconds, enabling the investigation of kinetics of ion decomposition over an extended range of decomposition rates. RRKM-based modeling of these reactions for a set of polyalanines demonstrates that SID kinetics of these simple peptides is very similar to slow, multiple-collision activation and that the distribution of internal energies following collisional activation is indistinguishable from a thermal distribution. For more complex peptides comprised of several amino acids and with internal degrees of freedom (DOF) of the order of 350 there is a dramatic change in kinetics in which RRKM kinetics is no longer capable of describing the decomposition of these complex ions. A combination of RRKM kinetics and the "sudden death" approximation, according to which decomposition occurs instantaneously, is a satisfactory description. This implies that a population of ions-which is dependant on the nature of the peptide, kinetic energy and sampling time-decomposes on or very near the surface. The shattering transition is described quantitatively for the limited set of molecules examined to date.

Collisional activation of peptide ions in FT-ICR mass spectrometry

In the last decade, the characterization of complex molecules, particularly biomolecules, became a focus of fundamental and applied research in mass spectrometry. Most of these studies utilize tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) to obtain structural information for complex molecules. Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) typically involves the mass selection of a primary ion, its activation by collision or photon excitation, unimolecular decay into fragment ions characteristic of the ion structure and its internal excitation, and mass analysis of the fragment ions. Although the fundamental principles of tandem mass spectrometry of relatively small molecules are fairly well-understood, our understanding of the activation and fragmentation of large molecules is much more primitive. For small ions, a single energetic collision is sufficient to dissociate the ion; however, this is not the case for complex molecules. For large ions, two fundamental limits severely constrain fragmentation in tandem mass spectrometry. First, the center-of-mass collision energy-the absolute upper limit of energy transfer in a collision process-decreases with increasing mass of the projectile ion for fixed ion kinetic energy and neutral mass. Secondly, the dramatic increase in density of states with increasing internal degrees of freedom of the ion decreases the rate of dissociation by many orders of magnitude at a given internal energy. Consequently, most practical MS/MS experiments with complex ions involve multiple-collision activation (MCA-CID), multi-photon activation, or surface-induced dissociation (SID). This review is focused on what has been learned in recent research studies concerned with fundamental aspects of MCA-CID and SID of model peptides, with an emphasis on experiments carried out with Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometers (FT-ICR MS). These studies provide the first quantitative comparison of gas-phase multiple-collision activation and SID of peptide ions. Combining collisional energy-resolved data with RRKM-based modeling revealed the effect of peptide size and identity on energy transfer in collisions-very important characteristics of ion activation from fundamental and the analytical perspectives. Finally, the combination of FT-ICR with SID was utilized to carry out the first time-resolved experiments that examine the kinetics of peptide fragmentation. This has lead to the discovery that the time-dependence of ion dissociation varies smoothly up to a certain collision energy, and then shifts dramatically to a time-independent, extensive dissociation. This near-instantaneous "shattering" of the ion generates a large number of relatively small fragment ions. Shattering of ions on surfaces opens up a variety of dissociation pathways that are not accessible with multiple-collision and multiphoton excitation.