I have put in a long night in the lab and I have measured some of the samples that I have collected recently on McGill campus. I was expecting a number of compounds, but instead I got … nothing.
I am quite confused. The GC-MS system is in excellent shape. The baseline is low and column bleeding is at a minimum (should that worry me?). The recent servicing (which was 2 days of work) paid off. Additionally, Farhad has switched the filament as well – so everything should be ok.
But what makes me really suspicious is that I have doped one of the samples with Chlorobenzene-d5, and I have not found it (not a single fragment!). Only a large amount of a EtOH-Toluene mixture showed up in the TIC. Next day a colleague told me that he had some problems too, but solved them by checking the injector and tightening all screws. Well, I will make sure everything is fine there next time and run a control sample.
