Nonequilibrium Physics
in Nanoconfinement

During the past century, significant progress has been made in expanding our atomistic understanding of systems in equilibrium. However, to understand life and much of the technology that sustains life, we need to be able to understand and control non-equilibrium processes. The past two decades have witnessed a paradigm shift away from studying equilibrium behaviour to the study of spatial and temporal organisation far from equilibrium.

This development is not just driven by scientific curiosity but by the realisation that a sustainable society is one that minimises waste in the form of heat and materials. To achieve these goals, we need to understand how living organisms combine robustness with selectivity and energy efficiency, and we have to learn how to transpose the underlying biological design principles to processes with inanimate, nano-scale building blocks.

Recent developments in the design of nano-pores have demonstrated that very large gains in the separation efficiency are possible by an appropriate nano-scale functionalization of the channels through which transport takes place. Transport through nano-pores is almost always coupled transport, coupling fluxes that would be independent in bulk materials.