Amazing stuff!
We still do not even understand the wonders of water very well! This is one of the reasons why global warming/climate change is a hoax!
"Water confined in nanoscale channels has dramatically different electrical properties from bulk water, researchers ... have demonstrated. The differences, which include up to 10,000-fold greater conductivity along the channel, are thought to arise from alterations to the hydrogen-bonded network in this quasi-2D environment. The findings could have a significant impact on scientists’ understanding of biochemical processes. ..."
"Researchers ... have made an unexpected discovery about one of the world's most familiar substances – water. When confined to spaces a few atoms thick, water transforms into something completely unfamiliar, exhibiting properties more commonly associated with advanced materials like ferroelectrics and superionic liquids. ...
"Think of it as if water has a split personality," ... "In one direction it is electrically dead, but look at it in profile and suddenly it becomes electrically super-active. Nobody expected such dramatic behaviour." ...
The research also reveals that confined water exists in two distinct electrical regimes. For channels larger than several nanometres, water behaves like its bulk form, albeit with much higher conductivity. But once squeezed to atomic dimensions, it undergoes a sharp transition into a new "superionic-like" state.
This transformation occurs because extreme confinement disrupts water's hydrogen-bond network, which in bulk is a dynamic but rather ordered structure. At the molecular scale this network becomes disordered, allowing dipoles to align more easily with electric fields and enabling rapid proton transport.
"Just as graphene revealed unexpected physics when graphite was thinned down to a single atomic layer, this research shows that even water – the most studied liquid on Earth – can still surprise us when squeezed to its absolute thinnest” ..."
From the abstract:
"Water is essential for almost every aspect of life on our planet and, unsurprisingly, its properties have been studied in great detail1. However, disproportionately little remains known about the electrical properties of interfacial and strongly confined water, in which the structure deviates from that of bulk water, becoming distinctly layered. The structural change is expected to affect the conductivity of water and particularly its polarizability, which in turn modifies intermolecular forces that play a crucial role in many physical and chemical processes.
Here we use scanning dielectric microscopy (SDM)10 to probe the in-plane electrical properties of water confined between atomically flat surfaces separated by distances down to 1 nm. For confinement exceeding several nanometres, water exhibits an in-plane dielectric constant close to that of bulk water and its proton conductivity is notably enhanced, gradually increasing with decreasing water thickness.
This trend abruptly changes when the confined water becomes only a few molecules thick.
Its in-plane dielectric constant reaches large, ferroelectric-like values of about 1,000, whereas the conductivity peaks at several S m−1, close to values characteristic of superionic liquids.
We attribute the enhancement to strongly disordered hydrogen bonding induced by the few-layer confinement, which facilitates both easier in-plane polarization of molecular dipoles and faster proton exchange. This insight into the electrical properties of nanoconfined water is important for understanding many phenomena that occur at aqueous interfaces and in nanoscale pores."
Water reveals superpowers hidden at the nanoscale (original news release) "New research shows water's dramatic electrical transformation when squeezed to just a few molecular layers thick."
Fig. 1: Broadband dielectric imaging of nanoconfined water.
Fig. 3: In-plane electrical properties of water under molecular-scale confinement.
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