Rubber Nanochannels

Filed in archive Research on May 19, 2007

Dr. Shuichi Takayama, an Associate Professor of Macromolecular Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, has fabricated nanoscale fluid channels simply by carefully stretching surface-treated rubber. This is similar to the way in which little cracks appear in a rubber band when you stretch it. The channels have a width in the ballpark of 80 nm and are tunable to some extent. Improvements in functionality are expected "through the integration of parallel and serial operations, sophisticated optics and a wealth of polymer chemistry", Takayama says. The image shows fluorescein molecules moving through an array of five nanochannels.