ABSTRACT
Irradiation of polymer foils by swift heavy ion beams is known to leave trails of radiation damage in the material that usually are more sensitive to dissolution by adequate aggressive chemicals than the neighboring unirradiated regions. The materials can either be attached to etched track walls as nanotubules, or they can fill the tracks partly or completely to form massive nanosized rods. This chapter examines another form of structures embedded within etched tracks, which are membranes that can be situated at any position within the tracks. The strategy adopted for this purpose is to combine two chemical reactions, etchant–polymer and etchant–reactant solution, with each other within the dynamic confinement of etched ion tracks. A peculiarity of experiments on coupled chemical reactions in dynamic nanometric confinement is the transient formation of stable, unsoluble, and impermeable membranes of the precipitating material (Ag2O) within the etched tracks that separate the latter into two compartments.
