The large diffusion coefficients of sub-10 nm aerosol have posed a long-standing challenge to the aerosol community; to understand nucleation and early growth, there is a need for methods such as those presented here that transmit a strong, high resolution signal of classified charged aerosol to the detector. I introduce a framework for comparison of the Flagan Laboratory classifiers to other instruments, and I show why our instruments perform favorably relative to these alternatives. Reducing...