Modeling of a Stacked Gated Nanofluidic Channel

Abstract

The objective of this work is to model and simulate molecule transport in a novel AND nanofluidic logic gate. A nanochannel was placed between two reservoirs with asymmetric target molecule concentration, controlled by independent electrical gates at both openings. When the dimension of the fluidic channel was comparable to the thickness of the electrical double layer (EDL), the potential generated by gating became significant, which allowed for control of charged molecule diffusion through the nanochannel modulated by electrostatic repulsion and attraction. Using two independent gates, the simulations show that the stacked gate structure implemented a nanofluidic AND logic gate for the charged molecule transport. The gated nanochannel structures were modeled in the finite element software (COMSOL Multiphysics).