Interactive comment on “ Superaggregates or instrument artifact ? ”

The paper reports a potential artifact during aerosol sampling due to aluminum tubing fretting. I think that making the community aware of this potential artifact is useful; however, I have some reservations regarding the title of the paper, the focus of the abstract/introduction, and the general organization. While the sentences are mostly clearly written, I found the paper confusing, I’ll try to explain why next. As it is, I think, the paper (especially considering the current title) might be misinterpreted as if the superaggregates detected in past work, and discussed in the literature, have been erroneously identified as such, while they were just an artifact. In reality, the current paper and findings have little to say about soot superaggregates, in my opinion. The agglomerated particles presented here have, apparently at least, nothing to do with the soot superaggregates reported and discussed in the literature. These aggregates (e.g., from Figure 7) look very different (even just visually) from the soot aggregates reported in Chakrabarty et al., for example; these are composed of a mixture of elements, in-