Simple Fabrication of Solid-State Nanopores on a Carbon Film.

Natsumi Takai,Tei Maki,Kan Shoji,Ryuji Kawano

doi:10.3390/mi12091135

Natsumi Takai, Tei Maki + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/mi12091135

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Abstract

Solid-state nanopores are widely used as a platform for stochastic nanopore sensing because they can provide better robustness, controllable pore size, and higher integrability than biological nanopores. However, the fabrication procedures, including thin film preparation and nanopore formation, require advanced micro-and nano-fabrication techniques. Here, we describe the simple fabrication of solid-state nanopores in a commercially available material: a flat thin carbon film-coated micro-grid for a transmission electron microscope (TEM). We attempted two general methods for nanopore fabrication in the carbon film. The first method was a scanning TEM (STEM) electron beam method. Nanopores were fabricated by irradiating a focused electron beam on the carbon membrane on micro-grids, resulting in the production of nanopores with pore diameters ranging from 2 to 135 nm. The second attempt was a dielectric breakdown method. In this method, nanopores were fabricated by applying a transmembrane voltage of 10 or 30 V through the carbon film on micro-grids. As a result, nanopores with pore diameters ranging from 3.7 to 1345 nm were obtained. Since these nanopores were successfully fabricated in the commercially available carbon thin film using readily available devices, we believe that these solid-state nanopores offer great utility in the field of nanopore research.

Highlights

Nanopore technology has received extensive attention due to its unique capabilities on the single-molecule scale, which makes it useful for several applications: single-molecule detection [1,2,3,4], nanopore sequencing [5,6], and as nanopore filters [7,8]
Nanopores Fabricated by the scanning TEM (STEM) electron beam sculpting (EB) Method
We demonstrated successful fabrication of nanopores in commercially available carbon films with high accuracy by the STEM EB method, the STEM EB method is still labor-intensive since a FE-transmission electron microscope (TEM) is expensive, and its operation requires specific skills and training

Summary

Introduction

Nanopore technology has received extensive attention due to its unique capabilities on the single-molecule scale, which makes it useful for several applications: single-molecule detection [1,2,3,4], nanopore sequencing [5,6], and as nanopore filters [7,8]. Because biological nanopores can provide a much smaller pore size and higher spatial resolution compared with solid-state nanopores (ssNPs), they have already been applied as DNA sequencers [1,6,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Glass nanopores [16], track-etched nanopores [17], and ssNPs [18,19] are constructed entirely of artificial materials Because they have advantages over biological nanopores including controllability of pore size, and mechanical, electrical, thermal, and chemical stability, they are expected to be widely applied as the nanopore sensors with the highest durability

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