Effects of crystal defects on the electrokinetics of nanofluidic crystal

Nanofluidic crystal (NFC) is attracting research interest as a novel nanofluidic material due to its various advantages over traditional microfabricated nanochannels. Crystal defects form during the self-assembly of NFC. In this work, we investigated the effects of crystal defects on the electrokinetics of NFC in the domain of micrometers (1-100 μm). We found that conductance of NFCs self-assembled in square micropores with lateral lengths of 10-90 μm all demonstrated conductance of a typical nanofluidic nanochannel. However, conductivity degraded dramatically with the increase of micropore sizes. At low concentrations where electrical double layers (EDLs) dominated the conductivity, conductivity dropped to only 20% from 10 to 90 μm micropores.