Osmotic Effects in Track-Etched Nanopores.

Asymmetrically etched ion-track membranes attract great interest for both fundamental and technical reasons because of a large variety of applications. So far, conductometric measurements during track etching provide only limited information about the complicated asymmetric etching process. In this paper, monitoring of osmotic phenomena is used to elucidate the initial phase of nanopore formation.

Shedding light on the mechanism of asymmetric track etching: an interplay between latent track structure, etchant diffusion and osmotic flow.

The method of producing single track-etched conical nanopores has received considerable attention and found many applications in diverse fields such as biosensing, nanofluidics, information processing and others. The performance of an asymmetric nanopore is largely determined by its geometry, especially by the size and shape of its tip. In this paper we reconstruct the profiles of so-called conical pores fabricated by asymmetric chemical etching of ion tracks in polymer foil.