Deciphering information encoded on the nanoscale

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 environment and health. This is anchored in their elusive nature and analytical challenges arising from it.

Although current approaches can retrieve some facets, we are blind for a majority of properties or cannot retrieve them coherently.

We are in a dire need to decipher basic traits of particles and gain more comprehensive insights in their compositions, size distributions and abundances.

Only this way, we can advance on our understanding on origin, implication, and fate of particulate entities.“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 elemental mass spectrometry, optical traps, and molecular spectroscopy to promote characterisations on a single particle level.

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, the identification of integral molecular and elemental information and the bottom-up modelling of dispersion parameters using single particle data.

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

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

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