The molecular structure of the interface between water and a hydrophobic substrate is liquid-vapor like
Author(s)
Willard, Adam P.
Chandler, David
Date Issued
October 2014
Journal
The Journal of Chemical Physics
Publisher
American Institute of Physics (AIP)
Citation
Willard, Adam P., and David Chandler. “The Molecular Structure of the Interface Between Water and a Hydrophobic Substrate Is Liquid-Vapor Like.” The Journal of Chemical Physics 141, no. 18 (November 14, 2014): 18C519.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
With molecular simulation for water and a tunable hydrophobic substrate, we apply the instantaneous interface construction [A. P. Willard and D. Chandler, “Instantaneous liquid interfaces,” J. Phys. Chem. B114, 1954–1958 (2010)] to examine the similarity between a water-vapor interface and a water-hydrophobic surface interface. We show that attractive interactions between a hydrophobic surface and water affect capillary wave fluctuations of the instantaneous liquid interface, but these attractive interactions have essentially no effect on the intrinsic interface. The intrinsic interface refers to molecular structure in terms of distances from the instantaneous interface. Further, the intrinsic interface of liquid water and a hydrophobic substrate differs little from that of water and its vapor. The same is not true, we show, for an interface between water and a hydrophilic substrate. In that case, strong directional substrate-water interactions disrupt the liquid-vapor-like interfacial hydrogen bonding network.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4897249
