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Nanopores

Ionic Coulomb blockade

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 825–826 (2016)Cite this article

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Classical ionic conduction through an inorganic monolayer nanopore is analogous to the quantum-mechanical phenomenon of electronic Coulomb blockade in quantum dots.

The transport of ions through nanochannels is a mesoscopic phenomenon lying squarely in the difficult and uncertain interface between classical and quantum physics. Perhaps this is why the transport mechanism — despite its importance to the ion channels of biological cells, and its increasing technological significance (for instance, in DNA sequencing) — has remained an enduring mystery. The observation by Jiandong Feng, Aleksandra Radenovic and colleagues of ionic Coulomb blockade1,2 in a water-filled subnanometre-wide channel through a molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) monolayer, reported in Nature Materials3, is thus of particular interest: it shows that the ions are behaving in many respects like the electrons in a quantum dot (that is, they display quantum-mechanical-like features).

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Figure 1: Coulomb blockade in ionic transport through a membrane nanopore.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Igor Kh. Kaufman and Peter V. E. McClintock are in the Department of Physics, Lancaster University, LA1 4YB, UK,

    Igor Kh. Kaufman & Peter V. E. McClintock

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  1. Igor Kh. Kaufman
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  2. Peter V. E. McClintock
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Correspondence to Igor Kh. Kaufman or Peter V. E. McClintock.

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Kaufman, I., McClintock, P. Ionic Coulomb blockade. Nature Mater 15, 825–826 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4701

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