Counterion Blockade in a Heterogeneously Charged Single-File Water Channel

The Possion-Nernst-Planck theories fail to describe the ionic transport in Angstrom channels, where conduction deviates from Ohm’s law, which is attributed to the dehydration/self-energy barrier and dissociation of Bjerrum ion pairs in previous work. Here, we find that the cations can be strongly bound to the surface charge, which blocks the ionic transport in a single-file water channel, causing nonlinear current-voltage curves. The presence of free ions significantly increases the probability of bound ions being released, resulting in an ionic current. We find that ionic conduction gradually becomes Ohmic as the surface charge density increases, but the conduction amplitude decreases due to the increased friction from the bound ions. We rationalize the ionic transport using 1D Kramers’ escape theory framework, which describes nonlinear ionic current and the impact of surface charge density on the I-V curves. Our results show that the strong Coulomb interaction between the counterion and surface charge may cause ionic blockade in Angstrom channels.