£1.2m award to investigate water's hidden electrical behaviour at the atomic scale

Researchers at Manchester have secured £1.2m EPSRC funding to study how water and electrolytes behave in atomically thin spaces, advancing understanding of confined liquids for energy, sensing, water treatment and nanofluidic technologies.

A new £1.2 million EPSRC grant will support researchers at The University of Manchester in exploring how water and dissolved salts behave under atomic-scale confinement, addressing a longstanding challenge in nanoscience, energy technologies and molecular biology.  

Researchers at the National Graphene Institute (NGI) at The University of Manchester have been awarded a £1.2 million Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Standard Research Grant to investigate the electrical properties of water and aqueous electrolytes when confined to spaces just a few atoms thick.  

Led by Dr Laura Fumagalli, the project, Unravelling the Electrical Properties of Two-Dimensional Water and Aqueous Electrolytes, will bring together researchers from Manchester alongside collaborators at Politecnico di Milano, the University of Cambridge and Oxford Instruments Asylum Research. The Manchester team includes co-investigators Professor Sir Andre Geim and Dr Alessandro Principi. 

Water is essential to processes ranging from energy storage and electrochemistry to biological function, yet many of its electrical properties remain poorly understood, particularly near surfaces and under extreme confinement. While scientists have studied these effects for decades, directly measuring them at the atomic scale has remained a major experimental challenge. 

The new project builds on recent breakthroughs by the Manchester team, which developed a unique experimental platform capable of confining water inside atomically thin channels and probing its electrical behaviour with nanoscale precision. Previous studies revealed that water confined to layers only one to two nanometres thick can exhibit unusual electrical polarisability and exceptionally high conductivity compared with bulk water (see https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat4191 and https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09558-y).

The research will focus on developing new devices made from two-dimensional materials that can confine water and electrolytes within atomically thin channels. Using an advanced scanning probe microscopy technique, scanning dielectric microscopy, the team will measure and map electrical properties including conductivity and dielectric response with unprecedented spatial resolution.  

Alongside experimental work, the project will develop new theoretical models to explain how water and ions behave under confinement and provide much-needed experimental benchmarks for simulations in physical chemistry, electrochemistry and molecular science.  

The findings could have implications across a range of fields. Water and electrolytes confined within nanoporous materials are central to batteries, fuel cells, supercapacitors, filtration membranes, emerging iontronic devices, which use ions rather than electrons to process and transmit signals, and biomolecular function. Improved understanding of their behaviour could help guide future developments in energy technologies, water treatment, sensing and nanofluidic systems. 

Professor Sarah Sharples, Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at The University of Manchester, "The properties of water under extreme confinement have surprised us before. By combining advanced two-dimensional materials with new nanoscale measurement techniques, we now have an opportunity to investigate questions that have remained experimentally inaccessible for many years."  

The three-year project will be carried out at the National Graphene Institute, drawing on Manchester's expertise in two-dimensional materials, nanoscale device fabrication and scanning probe microscopy, together with theoretical and industrial partners in the UK and Europe.