Unravelling the molecular origin of water/ice anomaly with scanning probe microscopy
e-mail: danwakai@issp.u-tokyo.ac.jpLanguage in Speech : English
Despite its ubiquity in nature, water is one of most complicated condensed matters. The understanding of water structure and phase transition is far from satisfactory, and many unusual properties of water remain as puzzles. The main reason arises from the many-body hydrogen (H)-bonding interaction between the water molecules. Moreover, the light H nuclei can exhibit prominent quantum effects, in terms of tunneling and zero-point motion. The so-called nuclear quantum effects (NQEs) add additional complexity to water and ice. In the past decade, we have steadily continued to improve accuracies of imaging and spectroscopic methods based on scanning probe microscopy (SPM), which acquire unprecedentedly high sensitivity to the H of single water molecule in a nearly non-invasive manner. In this talk, I will showcase the application of those techniques to probe water clusters, ion hydrates, two-dimensional ices and bulk ices, with increasing complexity. The obtained results provide molecular insights into various water/ice anomaly, including quantum nature of H bond [1-3], ultrafast water and ion transport under confinement [4-7], premelting and phase transition [8], etc.
References: [1] Meng et al., Nature Physics 11, 235 (2015), [2] Guo et al., Science 352, 321 (2016), [3] Tian et al., Science 377, 315 (2022), [4] Peng et al., Nature 557, 701 (2018), [5] Ma et al., Nature 577, 60 (2020), [6] Tian et al., Nature Nanotechnology 19, 479 (2024), [7] Wu et al., Science 384, 1254 (2024), [8] Hong et al., Nature 630, 375 (2024)
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