Stick-slip transition at the nanometer scale

We report the first observation of a stick-slip transition of surfactant solution flow through nanopores. From the experimental data, we were able to determine both the slip length and the critical wall shear stress from which slip occurs. Whereas the latter is found to increase linearly with the concentration, the former remains constant and approximately equal to 20 nm over the studied range of concentrations. We model slip to occur in the surfactant bilayer adsorbed at the nanopore wall. The stick-slip transition is then related to a reorganization of the surfactant bilayer from an entangled structure into independent layers flowing past one another, as evidenced by independent surface plasmon resonance experiments. We conclude from our analysis that surfactant solutions are always slipping in larger tubes. However, the larger the tube diameter, the smaller the relative slip contribution to the total flow.