| Abstract |
There is currently a critical need within the aerosol science community that is solved through the use of synchrotron radiation (SR) as an analytical tool. Determining the size, composition, and variation over time of fine airborne particles is crucial for understanding the sources, transport, and effects of atmospheric aerosols. Such understanding is critical in a variety of areas with important societal implications: including evaluating the transport of pollutants and their impacts on the environment, reducing aerosol derived harm to human health, and in modeling and understanding global climate. Although there are a number of analytical techniques that work well for determining the atomic composition of a sample, the collection methods necessary for size and time segregation produce prohibitively low-masses that invalidate such techniques. SR is an effective solution to that problem; X-ray fluorescence (XRF) using SR offers sufficient sensitivity to detect elemental concentrations on relatively low-mass samples. Here we present the importance of SR to the field of aerosol detection and measurement in three parts: the need for size- and time-resolved sampling, the current progress made in using SR-XRF to analyze these impacted substrates, and the advances that are on the horizon. |
