High-throughput nanopore fabrication and classification using FIB irradiation and automated pore edge analysis

Abstract: Large-area nanopore drilling is a major bottleneck in state-of-the-art nanoporous 2D membrane fabrication protocols. In addition, high-quality structural and statistical descriptions of as-fabricated porous membranes are key to predicting the corresponding membrane-wide permeation properties. In this work, we investigate Xe-ion focused ion beam as a tool for scalable, large-area nanopore fabrication on atomically thin, free-standing molybdenum disulphide. The presented irradiation protocol enables designing ultrathin membranes with tunable porosity and pore dimension, along with spatial uniformity across large-area substrates. Fabricated nanoporous membranes were characterized using scanning transmission electron microscopy imaging and the observed nanopore geometries were analyzed through a pore-edge detection script. We further demonstrated that the obtained structural and statistical data can be readily passed on to computational and analytical tools to predict the permeation properties at both individual pore and membrane-wide scales. As an example, membranes featuring angstrom-scale pores were investigated in terms of their emerging water and ion flow properties through extensive all-atom molecular dynamics simulations. We believe that the combination of experimental and analytical approaches presented here should yield accurate physics-based property estimates and thus potentially enable a true function-by-design approach to fabrication for applications such as osmotic power generation, desalination/filtration, as well as their strain-tunable versions.