Ion-induced nucleation of pure biogenic particles

By J. Kirkby, J. Duplissy, K. Sengupta, C. Frege, H. Gordon, C. Williamson, M. Heinritzi, M. Simon, Chao Yan, J. Almeida and 67 more. Nature, 2016

679 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Atmospheric aerosols and their effect on clouds are thought to be important for anthropogenic radiative forcing of the climate, yet remain poorly understood. Globally, around half of cloud condensation nuclei originate from nucleation of atmospheric vapours. It is thought that sulfuric acid is essential to initiate most particle formation in the atmosphere, and that ions have a relatively minor role. Some laboratory studies, however, have reported organic particle formation without the intentional addition of sulfuric acid, although contamination could not be excluded. Here we present evidence for the formation of aerosol particles from highly oxidized biogenic vapours in the absence of sulfuric acid in a large chamber under atmospheric conditions. The highly oxygenated molecules (HOMs) are produced by ozonolysis of α-pinene. We find that ions from Galactic cosmic rays increase the nucleation rate by one to two orders of magnitude compared with neutral nucleation. Our experimental findings are supported by quantum chemical calculations of the cluster binding energies of representative HOMs. Ion-induced nucleation of pure organic particles constitutes a potentially widespread source of aerosol particles in terrestrial environments with low sulfuric acid pollution.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38b931ba76f613e3c91ad9d75162a2395061b8c5

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Citations in the corpus

JournalofGeophysicalResearch : Atmospheres Causes and importance of new particle formation in the present-day and preindustrial atmospheres (2017, positive): “In the current study, we combine for the first time the parametrization of ion-induced NPF of monoterpene oxidation products alone [Kirkby et al., 2016] with the NPF model presented by Dunne et al. [2016], which quantifies NPF in terms of sulfuric acid, ions, ammonia, and monoterpene oxidation produ”
Modeling the formation and growth of atmospheric molecular clusters: A review (2020, background): “…molecules termed HOMs (Bianchi et al., 2019) have also been speculated to participate in sulfuric acid based new particle formation (Riccobono et al., 2014; Schobesberger et al., 2013), but most likely ionic pathways are required to facilitate the process (Kirkby et al., 2016; Rose et al., 2018).”