Honored with a dedicated Spectrochimica Acta Part B award session at SciX 2026, De Giacomo explains why larger nanoparticles produce stronger LIBS signals and what that means for sensing design.
Alessandro De Giacomo, a professor at the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy and a longtime editorial board member of Spectrochimica Acta Part B: Atomic Spectroscopy, is being recognized at SciX 2026 with a dedicated award session hosted through the journal.1
As part of our coverage of the 2026 SciX Conference in Sparks, Nevada, Spectroscopy sat down with De Giacomo to talk about his research. In this clip, De Giacomo discusses why
De Giacomo's research centers on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and the physics of laser-induced plasmas, including nanoparticle-enhanced LIBS (NELIBS) for trace analysis. His work has been applied to environmental monitoring, cultural heritage diagnostics, and space exploration.
LIBS is often valued for its speed and minimal sample preparation, but plasma behavior is notoriously difficult to model. De Giacomo discussed which aspect of laser-induced plasma physics took him the longest to understand well enough to control. Drawing on work across three very different application areas, each with its own end users and constraints, he also compared how designing a LIBS approach for a Mars mission differs from designing one for analyzing a painting or a soil sample.
A central topic of the conversation was his group's finding that smaller nanoparticles vaporize more efficiently, yet larger nanoparticles still produce a stronger LIBS signal overall. De Giacomo walked through why total atom count outweighs vaporization efficiency in this case.
He then addressed the practical recommendation that emerges from the work, that larger nanoparticles provide better detectability, and explains how that finding could reshape the design of LIBS-based sensing strategies. He considered, in particular, applications such as biomedical tagging, where particle size may already be constrained by other requirements.
Finally, De Giacomo offered advice to students deciding between fundamental plasma physics and applied instrument development within LIBS, drawing on his own experience building a career that has included both.
We are looking forward to sharing with you the rest of our conversation with De Giacomo soon. You can stay up to date on all our coverage of
