Microfluidic connections to hollow nanowires

Summary, in English

We have fabricated a device in which hollow nanowires (HNWs) lying on a glass surface are connected to microfluidic channels for the purpose of guiding DNA and to characterize the fluidic properties of our HNWs. The dimensions of our HNWs (inner diameter 10-80 nm, outer diameter 50-200 nm and length several μm) can be made on a scale much smaller than the size of a cell and on the same order of magnitude as the Debye length, making them interesting both for applications involving direct chemical access to the cytosol of living cells and for investigations of basic transport phenomena.