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Observation of ionic Coulomb blockade in nanopores

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 850–855 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Emergent behaviour from electron-transport properties is routinely observed in systems with dimensions approaching the nanoscale1. However, analogous mesoscopic behaviour resulting from ionic transport has so far not been observed, most probably because of bottlenecks in the controlled fabrication of subnanometre nanopores for use in nanofluidics. Here, we report measurements of ionic transport through a single subnanometre pore junction, and the observation of ionic Coulomb blockade: the ionic counterpart of the electronic Coulomb blockade observed for quantum dots. Our findings demonstrate that nanoscopic, atomically thin pores allow for the exploration of phenomena in ionic transport, and suggest that nanopores may also further our understanding of transport through biological ion channels.

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Figure 1: Ion transport through the sub-nm nanopore junction.
Figure 2: Current–voltage characteristics (I–V) of a 0.6-nm MoS2 nanopore in a potassium chloride aqueous solution (KCl).
Figure 3: Valence-dependent ion transport.
Figure 4: pH-induced conductance oscillations.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the European Research Council (grant no. 259398, PorABEL), SNSF Consolidator grant (BIONIC BSCGI0_157802) and SNSF Sinergia Grant no. 147607. We thank the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Microscopie Électronique (CIME) at EPFL for access to electron microscopes and D. Alexander for help with Cs-corrected TEM (Titan Themis). We thank S. Marion and P. Leburton for their careful reading of our manuscript and for the helpful comments. Device fabrication was partially carried out at the EPFL Center for Micro/Nanotechnology (CMi).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology, Institute of Bioengineering, School of Engineering, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

    Jiandong Feng, Ke Liu, Michael Graf & Aleksandra Radenovic

  2. Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures, Institute of Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

    Dumitru Dumcenco & Andras Kis

  3. Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA

    Massimiliano Di Ventra

Authors
  1. Jiandong Feng
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  2. Ke Liu
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  3. Michael Graf
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  4. Dumitru Dumcenco
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  5. Andras Kis
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  6. Massimiliano Di Ventra
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  7. Aleksandra Radenovic
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Contributions

J.F. conceived the idea, performed the measurements and interpreted the results. J.F. and K.L. fabricated the devices. J.F. and M.G. performed data analysis. D.D. and A.K. provided CVD-grown MoS2 samples. M.D.V. proposed the current–molarity relation. J.F. and A.R. designed the experiments and wrote the manuscript. A.R. supervised the work. All authors commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jiandong Feng or Aleksandra Radenovic.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Feng, J., Liu, K., Graf, M. et al. Observation of ionic Coulomb blockade in nanopores. Nature Mater 15, 850–855 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4607

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