Environmental Sciences Department Seminar

In the past decade, the use and applications of microscopies in aerosol science have grown significantly. This talk focuses on the evolution of scanning transmission x-ray microscopy in aerosol science over the last decade. It will cover the fundamental characterization of black carbons and soot to developing compositional mapping routines. This has now matured to a state that the information and evolution of the mixing states is beginning to be incoroporated into mixing state information into models. While microscopic methods are highly complementary and much of our work has utilized multiple micro and spectroscopic techniques, here, scanning transmission x-ray microsocpy will be highlighted. This will provide an overview of the studies focused on light absorbing particles (biomass burn, black carbon reference standards, soots) and how they are charaterized and used for mapping techniques to obtain mixing state information and work focused on sea salts and sea salt processing or metals will not be presented. As part of showing the evolution and applications of this method there will be some illustrative examples of current and future studies focussed on phase transitions, phase separation, and viscosity changes associated with water vapor uptake.