Research Toward the Application of Real-Time Gas Electron Diffraction as a Detector for Open Tubular Capillary Gas Chromatography

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We propose to investigate enhancements of real-time Gas Electron Diffraction (GED) leading to application of this structure-analytic technique to the detection of effluents from Open Tubular Capillary Gas Chromatography (OTC-GC) columns. Our group was the first to successfully detect diffracted electrons by a phosphor screen coupled to a photodiode array. Our procedures are unique in the use of multichannel detection to obtain direct real- time structural information on molecules in the vapor phase. Later, we identified improvements in design that extend serviceability of GED to the study of analytes leaving the column of a gas chromatograph. GED affords a universal detector with relatively uniform sensitivity for diverse molecular species. The most singular feature is that it yields information on the structural makeup of those species. By combining the two techniques, GC and GED, we have pioneered a new area of structural chromatography. We now propose detector enhancements aimed at extending the applicability of this new method from the current nanoliter requirement of sample size to the picoliter domain, which would enable investigations with OTC- GC. This tool may find considerable importance, potentially as a standard instrument for analytical applications. In addition, the detector enhancements will pay secondary benefits in other ongoing experiments: in determining the structures of transient species and in kinetic studies with time resolution in the nanosecond regime using real-time electron diffraction with pulsed electron beams.