No abstract

12Solid-state nanopores have broad applications in single-molecule biosensing and diagnostics, but 13 their high electrical noise associated with a large device capacitance has seriously limited both 14 their sensing accuracy and recording speed. Current strategies to mitigate the noise has focused on 15introducing insulating materials (such as polymer or glass) to decrease the device capacitance, but 16 the complex process integration schemes diminish the potential to reproducibly create such 17larger than the open-headstage system noise (~11 pA). Further, we demonstrate that the sapphire 29 nanopore chip outperforms the Si chip with a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR, 21 versus 11), 30 despite of its thicker membrane and larger nanopore size. We believe the low-noise and high-speed 31 sensing capability of sapphire nanopore chips, together with their scalable fabrication strategy, 32 will find broad use in a number of applications in molecular sensing and beyond. 33