AI Article Synopsis
- Nanofluidic channels create extreme confinement for water and ions, influencing transport phenomena based on the interactions with channel walls.
- Researchers found that metallic carbon nanotubes enhance water and proton transport more than semiconducting ones, while ion transport is not significantly affected by the nanotube's electronic properties.
- Simulations reveal that the unique polarizability of carbon nanotubes plays a key role in these transport processes, highlighting the intricate relationship between electronic properties and transport efficiency in nanoscale environments.
Article Abstract
Nanofluidic channels impose extreme confinement on water and ions, giving rise to unusual transport phenomena strongly dependent on the interactions at the channel-wall interface. Yet how the electronic properties of the nanofluidic channels influence transport efficiency remains largely unexplored. Here we measure transport through the inner pores of sub-1 nm metallic and semiconducting carbon nanotube porins. We find that water and proton transport are enhanced in metallic nanotubes over semiconducting nanotubes, whereas ion transport is largely insensitive to the nanotube bandgap value. Molecular simulations using polarizable force fields highlight the contributions of the anisotropic polarizability tensor of the carbon nanotubes to the ion-nanotube interactions and the water friction coefficient. We also describe the origin of the proton transport enhancement in metallic nanotubes using deep neural network molecular dynamics simulations. These results emphasize the complex role of the electronic properties of nanofluidic channels in modulating transport under extreme nanoscale confinement.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01925-w | DOI Listing |
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