Revealing Electrical Double-Layer Potential of Substrates by Hysteresis Ion Transport in Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy

The electrical double layer (EDL) at solid–liquid interfaces is key to interfacial transport and reaction processes and numerous emerging applications exploiting such processes. Herein, by studying hysteresis ion-transport processes in nanopipettes near charged substrates, we found the resulting cross-point potential (V_cp) to represent the surface potential of both nanopipettes and substrates. After the subtraction of V_cp in bulk solution, the remaining ΔV_cp shows excellent exponential decay with respect to the separation distance from the substrates and agrees very well with the classical double-layer theory. The revealed new hysteresis ion transport in nanopipettes would provide a new way for the simple and direct EDL imaging of various interfaces of interest with nanoscale resolution in scanning ion conductance microscopy.