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Local initiation conditions for water autoionization.


ABSTRACT: The pH of liquid water is determined by the infrequent process in which water molecules split into short-lived hydroxide and hydronium ions. This reaction is difficult to probe experimentally and challenging to simulate. One of the open questions is whether the local water structure around a slightly stretched OH bond is actually initiating the eventual breakage of this bond or whether this event is driven by a global ordering that involves many water molecules far away from the reaction center. Here, we investigated the self-ionization of water at room temperature by rare-event ab initio molecular dynamics and obtained autoionization rates and activation energies in good agreement with experiments. Based on the analysis of thousands of molecular trajectories, we identified a couple of local order parameters and show that if a bond stretch occurs when all these parameters are around their ideal range, the chance for the first dissociation step (double-proton jump) increases from [Formula: see text] to 0.4. Understanding these initiation triggers might ultimately allow the steering of chemical reactions.

SUBMITTER: Moqadam M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5960278 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Local initiation conditions for water autoionization.

Moqadam Mahmoud M   Lervik Anders A   Riccardi Enrico E   Venkatraman Vishwesh V   Alsberg Bjørn Kåre BK   van Erp Titus S TS  

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20180430 20


The pH of liquid water is determined by the infrequent process in which water molecules split into short-lived hydroxide and hydronium ions. This reaction is difficult to probe experimentally and challenging to simulate. One of the open questions is whether the local water structure around a slightly stretched OH bond is actually initiating the eventual breakage of this bond or whether this event is driven by a global ordering that involves many water molecules far away from the reaction center.  ...[more]

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