Polymer nanopores offer themselves as excellent test beds for study of phenomena that occur on the nano - scale, such as Debye layer formation, surface charge modulation, current saturation, and rectification. Studying ions interactions within the Debye layer, for example, is not possible on the micro - scale, where the pore diameter can be 100 times the size of the zone where interactions of interest occur. However, in our nanopores with an opening diameter less than 10 nm, a slight change of the Debye length can lead to drastic changes of the recorded ion current.

Here we present our nanopores' use as a tool to study geometrical and electrochemical properties of porous manganese oxide. There is great value in studying nano - scale properties of this material because of its importance in lithium ion batteries and newly developed nano - architectures within supercapacitors. We electrodeposited manganese oxide wires into our cylindrical nanopores, filling them completely. In this use, nanopores became a template to probe properties of the embedded material such as surface charge, ion selectivity, and porosity. This information was then reported to the Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) collaboration, so that other groups can incorporate these recently discovered characteristics into future their nano - architecture design.

Additionally, we constructed conical nanopores to study interactions between the surface charges found on the walls and alkali metal ions. In particular we looked at lithium, as it is the electrochemically active ion during charge cycling in EFRC energy storage devices. We attempted to reveal lithium ion's affinity to bind to surface charges. We found this binding led to lowering of the effective surface charge of the pore walls, while also decreasing lithium's ability to move through channels or voids that have charged walls. In connection to manganese oxide, a porous, charged material with voids, information on lithium's interaction with these charges is paramount.