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Thousands of tons of water are processed every year for hydrogen isotope separation, using extremely costly technology. Here the authors demonstrate a fully-scalable graphene electrochemical pump, which promises to dramatically reduce the energy and capital costs.

Defect-free monolayers of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride are highly permeable to thermal protons, but are impenetrable to gases. Here the authors show that mechanically exfoliated crystals exhibit perfect proton selectivity, corroborating proton transport through the bulk without atomic-scale defects.

The van der Waals gaps in h-BN and MoS₂ provide quantum confinement effects at ambient temperature, dominating the entry barriers of protons and deuterons.

Independent control of the electric field and charge-carrier density in double-gated graphene allows the decoupling of proton transport and lattice hydrogenation, enabling both accelerated proton transport and proton-based logic operations.

Few-layer micas show proton permeation across the sheet, exceeding that of graphene and hBN by one to two orders of magnitude.

Direct observation of electric field effects in the water dissociation reaction remains elusive. Here, the authors report an exponential acceleration of the reaction as function of the interfacial electric field using graphene electrodes decorated with Pt.

A study using high-resolution scanning electrochemical cell microscopy attributes proton permeation through defect-free graphene and hexagonal boron nitride to transport across areas of the structure that are under strain.

Recent experiments have shown that proton transport through graphene electrodes can be promoted by light, but the understanding of this phenomenon remains unclear. Here, the authors report the electrical tunability of this photo-effect, showing a connection between graphene electronic and proton transport properties.

GO monolayers are presumed to invariably contain a large density of nanoscale pinholes. Here the authors present gas and proton transport measurements which show that GO monolayers can be pinhole-free over micrometer-scale areas.

Layered clays are of interest for membranes and many other applications but their ion-exchange dynamics remain unexplored in atomically thin materials. Here, using electron microscopy, it is found that the ion diffusion for few-layer two-dimensional clays approaches that of free water and that superlattice cation islands can form in twisted and restacked materials.

Two-dimensional membranes with angstrom-sized pores are predicted to combine high permeability with exceptional selectivity, but experimental demonstration has been challenging. Here the authors realize angstrom-sized pores in monolayer graphene and demonstrate gas transport with activation barriers increasing quadratically with the molecular kinetic diameter.

Graphene is shown to be impermeable to helium and several other gases, except for hydrogen, which is attributed to the strong catalytic activity of ripples in the graphene sheet.

Nanometre-scale graphitic capillaries with atomically flat walls are engineered and studied, revealing unexpectedly fast transport of liquid water through channels that accommodate only a few layers of water.

Measurements show that monolayers of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride are unexpectedly highly permeable to thermal protons and that their conductivity rapidly increases with temperature, but that no proton transport is detected for few-layer crystals.