The fragmentation of metastable ions, having keV of kinetic energy, is analyzed by time-of-flight technique. Assuming isotropic distribution of fragments in a free field region, it is deduced an analytical expression to describe the corresponding peak shapes in linear TOF spectrometers. Metastable ion mean-life and the kinetic energy release (Q-value) are the quantities extracted from data fitting. As an illustration, the dissociation of C8H10N+ metastable ions, desorbed by 252Cf ssion fragment impact on organic target, is studied.
