Soot (also known as black carbon (BC) in the aerosol science community) is any black or brown aggregate (Fig. 1) which mainly consist of carbon with a variety of boning structures and is generated by incomplete combustion. Although soot formation occurs within few milliseconds to reach particle diameters of 30 nm [1], the whole process is extremely complicated, including three main stages: soot precursor formation, soot particle evolution and the soot inception between them [2, 3]...more