Contactless and rapid wetting of solid-state nanopore via ultrasonic wave

Solid-state nanopores hold substantial potential in single-molecule sensing. Fully wetting the nanopore is a crucial but challenging pre-treatment step for biomolecule sensing. Conventional wetting techniques, including passive wetting, plasma treatment, mechanical pressure, and thermal treatment, and chemical treatment, often suffer from limited effectiveness, high complexity, or incompatibility with certain materials and nanopore geometries. This work proposes a contactless ultrasonic wave-facilitated wetting (UFW) method for rapid nanopore wetting. Our experimental findings demonstrate that UFW enhances the wetting speed by over three orders of magnitude in SiNx nanopores compared to passive wetting, reducing the wetting time to minutes. Improvements are also observed in sandwiched ZnO–SiNx and ITO–SiNx structure nanopores with varying hydrophilicity. This work provides a rapid, real-time, chemical-free, and low-cost wetting method for solid-state nanopores and may also be applicable to other nanostructured systems.