Fluid Behavior in Porous Silicon Channels with Complex Pore Structure

1. Introduction Molecular dynamics under confinement is a subject of extensive scientific research. Besides fundamental interest, the understanding of the very intrinsic mechanisms of how confinements alter the fluid transport properties has an immense impact on application-oriented sciences, including life sciences in particular. Having the possibility of preparing mesoporous materials with well-defined structural properties, one may thus study structure-related aspects of the fluid phase behaviour and of molecular propagation. Among such host systems, mesoporous silicon (PSi) which, by a proper tuning of the fabrication conditions, can be prepared to consist of macroscopically long, linear pores with a uniform pore diameter, allows a most straightforward quantification of the experimental results. Moreover, the fabrication procedure permits variation of the pore diameter along the pore axis, providing the option to study complex network effects in a simplified pore system [1].