Structural Determination of Nanomaterials with Electrospray Differential Mobility Analysis

Leonard Pease (NIST CSTL)

The structure of nanomaterials and biological molecules plays an integral role in their function. In pursuit of NIST.s mission to advance measurement science, we have refined electrospray differential mobility analysis (ES-DMA) with the goal of generating multimodal size distributions to inform studies on the structure, assembly, and aggregation of these materials. In ES-DMA, particles suspended in aqueous solution are electrosprayed, separated using a differential mobility analyzer based on their charge-to-size ratio, and then enumerated with a condensation particle counter. The advantages of ES-DMA are that it requires no labeling, provides a direct read-out of particle size distributions, rapidly measures statistically significant populations, and detects changes as small as 0.2 nm. This talk will describe the theory of operation of ES-DMA and provide an overview of our efforts to characterize DNA functionalized gold nanoparticles, the aggregation of nanoclusters and antibodies, and virus particles.

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