Electric-Double-Layer-Modulation Microscopy

The electric double layer (EDL) formed around charged nanostructures at the liquid-solid interface determines their electrochemical activity and influences their electrical and optical polarizability. We experimentally demonstrate that restructuring of the EDL at the nanoscale can be detected by dar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Namink, Kevin, Meng, Xuanhui, Koper, Marc T M, Kukura, Philipp, Faez, Sanli
Format Paper Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 09.04.2020
Subjects
Charging
Electric double layer
Image contrast
Ion current density
Ion currents
Liquid-solid interfaces
Microscopy
Nanostructure
Physics - Chemical Physics
Physics - Optics
Physics - Soft Condensed Matter
Scattering
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Summary:The electric double layer (EDL) formed around charged nanostructures at the liquid-solid interface determines their electrochemical activity and influences their electrical and optical polarizability. We experimentally demonstrate that restructuring of the EDL at the nanoscale can be detected by dark-field scattering microscopy. Temporal and spatial characterization of the scattering signal demonstrates that the potentiodynamic optical contrast is proportional to the accumulated charge of polarisable ions at the interface and its time derivative represents the nanoscale ionic current. The material-specificity of the EDL formation is used in our work as a label-free contrast mechanism to image nanostructures and perform spatially-resolved cyclic voltametry on ion current density of a few attoamperes, corresponding to the exchange of only a few hundred ions.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1909.12801