Physical Society Colloquium

Wet, Wiggly, Weird, and Wonderful – New Discoveries in Nanofluidics

Derek Stein

Physics Department
Brown University

About 30 years ago, pioneers began to borrow fabrication techniques from the semiconductor industry to make tiny fluidic circuits on chips. That field of research became known as microfluidics, because the chips featured tubes that were smaller than a millimeter. Today it’s possible to make tubes that are nanometers in size, and research in the nanofluidics field is uncovering a wealth of curious phenomena related to the interplay of thermal fluctuations, electrostatics, fluid dynamics, and polymer physics. In this talk, I’ll describe some counterintuitive recent discoveries: electrical currents driven by viscosity, forces that can be measured with a video camera, and DNA motion driven by salt. I’ll also describe an ambitious attempt to apply the techniques of nanoscience to the challenge of reading the sequence of amino acids that make up a single protein molecule.