What are the benefits of using zero capillary voltage for discarding fractions in LC–ESI–MS/MS?
I think there is no perfect answer to this situation. In general when the flow is stopped to any detector in an HPLC experiment, there is a change in baseline, and when the flow is re-started, ghost peaks appear in chromatogram. I am talking about optical detectors such as UV, fluorescence, refractive index etc. Same thing happens in MS and perhaps LC ESI-MS is not an exception, in the sense that diverting the flow can lead to the appearance of so-called &quot;ghost&quot; peaks or raised baseline. I have seen that in GC-MS experiments where a change in flow causes weird baseline shifts. This is an interesting phenomenon worth investigating.
So the authors suggest that let us continue the flow, but let us stop the ionization process so that the junk does not go inside the quadrupoles and stay there forever. It is always easy the clean the external ESI system but the internal system needs professional service.
Someone talks about these problems in this forum Diverter valve issues