A Novel Design Toward Understanding and Characterizing Transport Behavior of Composite Mesoporous Silica Thin Films

Abstract

In this paper, we for the first time apply a so-called “bottom-up” approach in fabricating synthetic ion-channel by exploiting evaporation-induced self-assembly (EISA) to form highly ordered porous thin film silica structures with precisely defined pore size, connectivity and surface chemistry as well as mechanical/thermal robustness. Here we demonstrate a novel design to integrate the above porous and composite nanostructures into an electrochemical device in which transmembrane ion fluxes can be measured to characterize the transport behaviors of ions/molecules through our mesoporous silica thin film. The demonstration of DNA translocation indicates a possible application of the mesoporous thin film structure in low cost DNA sequencing.