Tesla coil lighter pore fabrication

Tesla-coil-assisted method
The circuit used in 2019, drawn for this article: the lighter's two electrodes, a 1 GΩ resistor and a silicon nitride membrane between two wells of water. Not to scale.
Acronym	TCAM
Classification	Nanopore fabrication; a variant of controlled dielectric breakdown
Inventors	Y. M. Nuwan D. Y. Bandara, Buddini I. Karawdeniya and Jason R. Dwyer
Year	2019
Related	Burnerphone

Tesla coil lighter pore fabrication, which its developers called the Tesla-coil-assisted method (TCAM), is a way of making a nanopore in a thin silicon nitride membrane with a handheld electric arc lighter of the kind sold as a "Tesla coil lighter". Three chemists at the University of Rhode Island described it in ACS Omega in January 2019, under the title "Push-Button Method To Create Nanopores Using a Tesla-Coil Lighter". It is a variant of controlled dielectric breakdown, in which a voltage applied across a membrane opens a hole in it, and the authors used the pores it made to detect single DNA molecules.^[1]

Molecular Reality Corporation tried the method on "one night or two" and reported in 2026 that "we may or may not have made pores".^[2]

Making a solid-state nanopore long depended on electron microscopes, helium ion microscopes or particle accelerators.^[1] In 2014 a group at the University of Ottawa showed that a pore could instead be made in a silicon nitride membrane immersed in salt solution by applying a voltage across it and watching the leakage current until the membrane broke down at one point.^[3] The fields involved are typically up to about 1 volt per nanometer of membrane, or about ten volts across the 10 nm films used for sensing. Because the pore forms under liquid, it is wet from the moment it exists.^[1][3]

In their paper, the 2019 authors wrote that they had been inspired by that method and by "the barriers to adoption of even such an elegant fabrication method", and asked whether one could make a nanopore "preferably 'by hand' and with the push of a button".^[1]

Each membrane was silicon nitride, 11 ± 1 nm thick, on a silicon frame, clamped between silicone gaskets in a PTFE holder with two wells of about 500 µL. The lighter's two electrodes were wired to silver/silver chloride electrodes in the wells. The methods section identifies the lighter by its Amazon catalog number and adds a safety note: "Precautions appropriate to a high voltage power supply capable of igniting flammable materials should be observed."^[1]

Simply putting the lighter where a laboratory voltage source would go did not work. In 1 M and even 10 mM potassium chloride, the membranes afterward passed currents "beyond the dynamic range of the current amplifier": the breakdown had run out of control. The authors made two changes to lower the voltage across the membrane: they filled the wells with ultrapure water, whose resistivity of about 18 MΩ cm is far higher than that of salt solution, and they put a 1 GΩ resistor in series with the lighter. Because the lighter has a push button and a built-in time-out, the dose could not be set by time, so they counted pulses instead, one per quick press and release.^[1]

The procedure alternated between the two liquids. After 18 pulses the water was replaced with 1 M potassium chloride and the membrane's conductance measured. If it was still near zero, the salt was rinsed out, two or three more pulses were given, and the cycle repeated until a pore of the desired size appeared. About 20 pulses were the minimum for a conductance in the usual nanopore range, and further pulses enlarged the pore.^[1]

The authors gave the size of a typical pore made this way, estimated from its conductance, as about 9 nm. The authors drove lambda DNA through one at +600 mV in 4 M lithium chloride and recorded blockades at two depths, the second about 2.03 times the first, which matches single molecules passing straight through and folded in half. From the depth of the single-file events they calculated a radius for the DNA of 1.26 to 1.37 nm, in the range reported for hydrated DNA, and the event durations corresponded to about 20 ns per base pair, "comparable to translocation speeds reported for nanopores fabricated by other means."^[1]

The surface chemistry was different. The conductance of pores made by conventional breakdown varied with pH on both sides of an isoelectric point near pH 4.3, as expected for silicon nitride. Pores made with the lighter showed a flat conductance in acid and a rise in more basic solution, which the authors fitted as a surface with a single kind of acidic group, of pK_a about 5.6. The authors saw two uses in this: a pore whose conductance stays put over a range of pH, and the possibility of changing an analyte's charge with pH without changing the pore's. Since the lighter's voltage was high enough that 10 nm membranes needed a series resistor, they expected it to open pores in thicker membranes too, and they suggested applications outside sensing, including "leak valves in vacuum science".^[1]

On March 29, 2026, Kent Kemmish posted the paper to the members' inbox of EQBio-OS, the software of the company's game Epic Quest Bio, under the title "making pores with a $20 Tesla coil lighter", with a yellow label reading "ZAP". His note began: "Yes, we actually tried this." He gave the method's attraction in one sentence: "One advantage over using a 9V battery is that it might open up making pores through membranes too thick for that approach." On the outcome he was brief: "Results were messy, and just from one night or two of tinkering with the team at the time", the team "may or may not have made pores, but it's worth trying again."^[2][a]

The comparison with a 9 V battery had a history at the company. The best mode of Kemmish's patent on stacked sliding pores makes its holes by applying "a 9V battery" to three layers of graphene in pulses of about ten seconds.^[4] Between 2021 and 2023 the company also developed the Burnerphone, a compact research unit that made pores by controlled dielectric breakdown, before withdrawing it from commercial plans.^[5]

Breakdown methods sidestep one of the problems Kemmish has called "dumb problems", of which he named the worst: "how do you get water through the pore?" A pore made by breakdown never needs wetting, since there is liquid on both sides when it opens.^[6][3] The silicon pores the company bought in 2018, drilled with a focused ion beam at "about $100 each", had to be wetted afterward, and in the first week of trying "we broke most of them."^[6]

• Dumb problems
• Nanopore fabrication
• Solid-state nanopore
• Silicon nitride membrane