Ionic Coulomb blockade in nanopores.

An understanding of the dynamics of ions in nanopores is essential for applications ranging from single-molecule detection to DNA sequencing. We show both analytically and by means of molecular dynamics simulations that under specific conditions ion-ion interactions in nanopores lead to the phenomenon of ionic Coulomb blockade, namely the build up of ions inside a nanopore with specific capacitance impeding the flow of additional ions due to Coulomb repulsion. This is the counterpart of electronic Coulomb blockade observed in mesoscopic systems. We discuss the analogies with and differences from the electronic case as well as experimental situations in which this phenomenon could be detected.