Atmospheric particulate matter impacts almost every aspect of the Earth system and society. It affects climate & precipitation and upon inhalation can lead to premature mortality and sickness. Transport and deposition of aerosol can also strongly impact ecosystems, and highly toxic compounds contained within particles can affect water quality and soils. Much of these impacts strongly depend on the acidity levels in the particles and the presence of trace-level constituents. Yet these critically important particle properties are highly challenging to measure in-situ, as currently used techniques either require collection of considerable amounts of sample and subsequent chemical analysis (as in the case of toxic trace compounds such as PAHs, quinones, PCBs and PFAS), or can only be inferred through modeling of chemical composition data (which is the case of aerosol acidity). AERO-SERS bridges this gap by bringing together two worlds: the very well established technology of filter-based aerosol sampling with the relevant of SERS, a non-destructive sensing technique that promises to detect pg levels of constituents with a high degree of accuracy. This will be accomplished by functionalizing commercially available filter substrates with novel multi-functional SERS substrates, which upon contact with aerosol collected on the filter will allow direct and non-destructive sensing of aerosol acidity levels and toxic compounds.

AERO-SERS is a collaborative project between the LAMS group of ICEHT-FORTH (Dr. Voyatzis and Prof. Nenes), the TCM group of IESL-FORTH (Prof. Binas) and the Polymer Electronics Lab of IESL-FORTH (Dr. Pavlopoulou).