Revisiting the access conductance of a nanopore in a charged membrane

Abstract

Electric-field-driven electrolyte transport through nanoporous membranes is important for applications including osmotic power generation, sensing, and iontronics. We derive an analytical equation in the Debye–Hückel regime and a semi-analytical equation for arbitrary surface potentials for the electric-field-driven electric current through a pore in an ultrathin membrane, which predict scaling with fractional powers of the pore size and Debye length. We show that our theory for arbitrary electric potentials accurately quantifies the ionic conductance through an ultrathin membrane in finite-element method numerical simulations for a wide range of parameters and generalizes a widely used theory for the access electrical conductance of a membrane nanopore to a broader range of conditions. Our theory predicts that fractional power-law scaling of the ionic conductance with electrolyte concentration at low concentrations is an intrinsic property of charged ultrathin membranes and also occurs for thicker membranes for which the access contribution to the conductance dominates, which could help to explain experimental observations of this widely debated phenomenon.