Deciphering information encoded on the nanoscale

Introduction

Despite the natural ubiquity of nano- and microparticles and their increasing production and emission in anthropogenic processes, we struggle to understand their direct impact on the environment and health. This is anchored in their elusive nature and analytical challenges arising from it.

Analytical Challenges

Although current approaches can retrieve some facets, we are blind to a majority of properties or cannot retrieve them coherently. We are in dire need to decipher basic traits of particles and gain more comprehensive insights into their compositions, size distributions, and abundances. Only this way can we advance our understanding of the origin, implication, and fate of particulate entities.

Project Overview

“NanoArchive” will provide new paradigms and innovations to enable the analysis of particles and aims to close a persistent gap in our understanding of the world at the nano- and microscale. The technological innovation is based on the convolution of:

1. Elemental mass spectrometry
2. Optical traps
3. Molecular spectroscopy

This approach promotes characterizations on a single particle level.

Technological Innovation

The hyphenation of newly emerging technologies goes far beyond the current state-of-the-art but provides new opportunities to gain complementary and comprehensive perspectives on particles. Our aim is the empowerment of:

• Non-target particle analyses
• Identification of integral molecular and elemental information
• Bottom-up modeling of dispersion parameters using single particle data

This way, we will be able to bring particle science to a groundbreaking new level, allowing us to understand particles in our environment.

Application Potential

The application potential of “NanoArchive” will be demonstrated by focusing on glacier ice cores – the ideal archive to investigate natural background as well as the chronological evolution of human emission.

Broader Impact

However, the full impact of “NanoArchive” goes much beyond, potentially revolutionizing the analytics and understanding of particles in fields like geology, biology, or medicine.