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, 4].

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Soot aggregate under high-resolution transmission electron microscopy

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Adverse impacts of soot/BC on climate change and human health are often pointed out as pertinent issues in almost all environment and health studies [5, 6]. It is therefore a central motivation of many studies to focus on their formation in natural and artificial burning processes as well as on their emission in the atmosphere. The scientific interest for soot formation processes is to develope more efficient and less polluting combustion techniques and to produce on a large scale and cheap nanomaterials with a variety of chemical properties in both science and industry; for instance carbon fullerenes and carbon nanotubes or graphene and graphene-like materials.

 

Our research focus on developing and applying various state-of-the-art laser-based diagnostic techniques such as Raman scattering, ultra-violet-visible (UV-Vis) absorption, laser-induced incandescence (LII), laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) spectroscopies, time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOFMS) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) to study soot formation processes as well as chemical, optical, structural properties and morphology of soot and other carbonaceous materials.