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in this video we're going to focus on mass spectroscopy so here we have the mass spectrum of pentane and just to give you a little background information on how this technology works so basically you would take a sample like this one pentane and put it in a mass spectrometer and what's going to happen is that sample is going to be vaporized and then it's going to be ionized using an electron beam now when it ionizes it can fragment into radicals and cations but only the positively charged ions will make it through the analyzer and reach the detector in this graph on the y-axis we have the relative abundance of the fragments so this represents the quantity of the positively charged fragments that reach the detector and on the x axis we have the mass of charge ratio now let's say if we get a methyl cation typically the charge will be plus one so if z is one then m over z becomes the mass of the fragment so what we want to do in this example is we want to determine what fragments will for