One application area that has seen significant academic effort and some commercial effort is in the area of particle detection in fluids. Particle detection of small fluid-borne particles down to about 1 μm in diameter is typically done using a Coulter counter, in which electrical signals are generated when a weakly-conducting fluid such as in saline water is passed through a small (~100 μm diameter) pore, so that an electrical signal is generated that is directly proportional to the ratio of the particle volume to the pore volume. The physics behind this is relatively simple, described in a classic paper by DeBlois and Bean, and the implementation first described in Coulter's original patent. This is the method used to e.g. size and count erythrocytes (red blood cells ) as well as leukocytes (white blood cells) for standard blood analysis. The generic term for this method is resistive pulse sensing (RPS); Coulter counting is a trademark term. However, the RPS method does not work well for particles below 1 μm diameter, as the signal-to-noise ratio falls below the reliably detectable limit, set mostly by the size of the pore in which the analyte passes and the input noise of the first-stage amplifier.