Environment and Energy Research Theme Seminar
Guest Speaker: Prof Radha Boya, University of Manchester
Title: One atom thin Capillaries: Confined Water, Ion and Gas flows
Abstract: It has been an aspiring goal to controllably fabricate nanopores and capillaries with dimensions approaching the size of small ions and water molecules. But surface roughness makes it challenging to produce capillaries with precisely controlled dimensions at this spatial scale. We have developed a method for fabrication of one atom thin, smooth angstrom (Å) scale capillaries through van der Waals assembly of two-dimensional (2D)-materials [1-5]. These capillaries can be envisaged as if individual atomic planes are removed from a bulk layered crystal leaving behind flat voids of a chosen height.
A core strand of the work that I will present is the development of Angstrom-capillaries as a platform to probe intriguing molecular-scale phenomena experimentally, including: water flow under extreme atomic-scale confinement [5], complete steric exclusion of ions [3,5], specular reflection and quantum effects in gas reflections off a surface [2], voltage gating of ion flows [4]. I will discuss and compare these gas flows to that in atomic-scale apertures, created from missing tungsten (W) sites in freestanding (WS2) monolayers, which showed fast helium flow [6].
Academic host: Dr Matthew Rigby
This seminar will be held online.