What is a Liquid Beam

A liquid beam is a continuous laminar flow of a pure liquid or solution into a high vacuum. The advent of liquid beam technologies has created a frontier field of science that is revolutionizing the study of liquid surfaces and opening up new routes of study in the analytical chemistry of biological molecules. Detection and identification of molecules evaporated from a liquid beam surface, or ions ejected from it, by laser irradiation allows for novel studies of the liquid surface or of the bulk liquid by means of mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy. The mechanisms of evaporation and laserinduced desorption have been extensively studied, with recent advances quantifying the internal energy content of chemical species liberated from the liquid beam surface. [1] On the other hand, mass spectrometric analysis of molecules and ions liberated from liquid beams has developed into an analytical tool of great versatility. In particular, specific recent advances in the application of mass spectrometry for the detection and identification of biological molecules (including DNA and