  Large-area nanopore drilling is a major bottleneck in state-of-the-art
nanoporous 2D membrane fabrication protocols. In addition, high-quality
structural and statistical descriptions of as-fabricated porous membranes are
key to predicting the corresponding membrane-wide permeation properties. In
this work, we investigate Xe-ion focused ion beam as a tool for scalable,
large-area nanopore fabrication on atomically thin, free-standing molybdenum
disulphide. The presented irradiation protocol enables designing ultrathin
membranes with tunable porosity and pore dimension, along with spatial
uniformity across large-area substrates. Fabricated nanoporous membranes were
characterized using scanning transmission electron microscopy imaging and the
observed nanopore geometries were analyzed through a pore-edge detection
script. We further demonstrated that the obtained structural and statistical
data can be readily passed on to computational and analytical tools to predict
the permeation properties at both individual pore and membrane-wide scales. As
an example, membranes featuring angstrom-scale pores were investigated in terms
of their emerging water and ion flow properties through extensive all-atom
molecular dynamics simulations. We believe that the combination of experimental
and analytical approaches presented here should yield accurate physics-based
property estimates and thus potentially enable a true function-by-design
approach to fabrication for applications such as osmotic power generation,
desalination/filtration, as well as their strain-tunable versions.
