Measuring temperature effects on nanobubble nucleation via a solid-state nanopore

Abstract

In this study, we designed SiN_X solid-state nanopores to detect the temperature effect on the hydrogen nanobubble formation. Here, we integrated a temperature controller with the highly sensitive nanopore. As the temperature decreases from 25 °C to 5 °C, the occurrence of the nanobubble nucleation inside a 12.3 nm SiN_X nanopore confined space decreased from 102 s⁻¹ to 23 s⁻¹, and the life-time of nanobubbles increased from 1.16 ms to 4.78 ms. The results further gave the activation energy for nanobubble nucleation which was 8.1 × 10⁻²⁰ J with a 12.3 nm SiN_X nanopore. Our method provides an efficient analytical tool for revealing the temperature-dependent nanobubble nucleation, which further benefits the fundamental understanding of nanobubble nucleation.