Experimental Evidence for Internal Structure in Aqueous-Organic Nanodroplets

The spatial distribution of species within an aerosol droplet influences how it interacts with its environment. Despite the ubiquity of multicomponent nanodroplets in natural and technological aerosols, there are no published measurements of their internal structure. Here, we report the first experimental results for structure in aqueous organic nanodroplets based on small angle neutron scattering by high number density aerosols. For H2O-n-butanol droplets, fitting of the diffraction patterns confirms the picture of an aqueous core containing 3 mol% alcohol covered by a shell of densely packed alcohol molecules