Congratulations to doctoral student Wenchao  Liu for his article being included in Sci Adv!

Recently, Associate Professor Kai Xiao's research group published a research article titled " Bioinspired carbon nanotubes-based nanofluidic ionic transistor with ultrahigh switching capabilities for logic circuits" in the Science Advance. The first author of the article is Wenchao Liu, a doctoral student in 2022. Mei Tingting, a research assistant, and Cao Zhouwen, a National Nanotechnology Center are the co first authors. Chen Ruotian, an associate researcher of Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tu Bin, an associate researcher of National Nanotechnology Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and   Associate Professor Xiao Kai, are the corresponding authors of the paper.

Abstract: Inspired by the switching mechanism of voltage-gated ion channels (i.e. life's transistors), this work successfully prepared ionic transistors based on carbon nanotubes, which can achieve ultra-high switching ratios (10⁴) at ultra-low gate voltages. In addition, logic gates were constructed based on ionic transistors, demonstrating their application and development in ion circuits.

Nature has chosen ions as the information carrier for the human brain, and the close coordination of various ion channels on nerve cells has formed the advantage of fast computing and low energy consumption in the human brain. Inspired by nature, ion information devices, compared to electronic devices, still in their early stages, have shown enormous application prospects. We expect ion transistors to play important roles in the near future in the concentration or separation of ions and molecules in seawater, physiological disease detection in clinical medicine. Additionally, nanofluidic systems can aims to mimic the energy-efficient information processing of the human brain (such as various pulse signals based on action potentials, biological oscillations, long-term and short-term memory, etc.), this provides significant advantages for implantable nanofluidic devices and barrier-free brain-computer interfaces.

Figure 1. Bioinspired design and switching state of nanofluidic ion transistor.

The research group report a nanofluidic ionic transistor based on carbon nanotubes, which exhibits an on/off ratio of 10⁴ at operational gate voltage as low as 1 V (Figure 2). By controlling the morphology of carbon nanotubes, both unipolar and ambipolar ionic transistors are realized, and their on/off ratio can be further improved by introducing an Al₂O₃ dielectric layer. Meanwhile, this ionic transistor enables the polarity switching between p-type and n-type by controlled surface properties of carbon nanotubes. The implementation of constructing ionic circuits based on ionic transistors is demonstrated, which enables the creation of NOT, NAND, and NOR logic gates.

Figure 2. Application and outlook diagram of ionic transistor

Link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj7867