Ionic Capillary Evaporation in Weakly Charged Nanopores

Abstract

Using a variational field theory, we show that an electrolyte confined to a neutral cylindrical nanopore traversing a low dielectric membrane exhibits a first-order ionic liquid-vapor pseudo-phase-transition from an ionic-penetration "liquid" phase to an ionic-exclusion "vapor" phase, controlled by nanopore-modified ionic correlations and dielectric repulsion. For weakly charged nanopores, this pseudotransition survives and may shed light on the mechanism behind the rapid switching of nanopore conductivity observed in experiments.

This version is accepted for publication in PRL

References in corpus (2)

• Statics and Dynamics of Strongly Charged Soft Matter
• Variational approach for electrolyte solutions: from dielectric interfaces to charged nanopores

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