Water trapped inside channels so small they are measured in billionths of a metre may not behave like water at all. That was the striking message from today’s QAMSS lecture series talk held at the Cambridge Graphene Centre, where Dr Qian Yang revealed how squeezing water into atomically thin spaces uncovers an entirely different molecular world.
Dr Yang, from the University of Manchester, described a new way to build layered materials into precisely engineered nanocapillaries, with heights ranging from a few angstroms to several nanometres. These channels allow researchers to study water and ions under extreme confinement, where familiar physical behaviour begins to break down.
Previous methods for making such structures relied on slow lithography techniques and often left behind polymer contamination. Dr Yang presented a much faster fabrication process that cuts production times from weeks to just hours while producing ultraclean channels.
Using these improved nanocapillaries, researchers observed quantized water filling, a phenomenon showing that water enters the tiny channels in discrete molecular layers rather than as a continuous liquid. The findings offer rare evidence of the individual molecular nature of water when confined to extremely small spaces.
The lecture also explored how confined water behaves in natural environments, including inside gypsum and at graphene interfaces. According to Dr Yang, these studies are helping scientists understand the structure and movement of nanoconfined fluids, knowledge that could lead to major advances in filtration, sensing technologies and future nanofluidic devices.