ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Particle mass analyser

Oh hi there kiddo, do you know what a particle mass analyser is? It's like a special machine that helps us figure out what tiny particles are made of. Let me explain it in a way you'll understand!

Imagine you have a bunch of Legos, but you don't know what they're supposed to make. You could take them apart and examine each piece to see what shape they are and how they fit together, right? That's kind of like what a particle mass analyser does.

Particles are like tiny Legos that are invisible to our eyes, so we need a machine to help us look at them. The machine takes the particles and shoots them through a special tube. Inside the tube there are different things like magnets and electric fields that help sort the particles based on their size and weight.

Think of it like a game at the carnival where you use a fishing pole to catch different prizes with different weights. You could catch a small plastic toy with no problem, but the big stuffed animal is harder to lift because it's heavier. That's kind of what the particle mass analyser does with the particles, it sorts them based on how much they weigh.

Once the particles are sorted, the machine can measure what they're made of. Just like you can look at a Lego and say "hey, that's a green square," the particle mass analyser can figure out what atoms and molecules are in the particles.

So in summary, a particle mass analyser is like a fancy machine that sorts tiny particles and tells us what they're made of, kind of like a carnival game with Legos!