A group of scientists observed for the first time an unusual interaction of water molecules at the atomic level

An international scientific group consisting of representatives from the National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC USA), Stanford, and Stockholm universities for the first time in history performed direct observation of the process during which hydrogen atoms that make up a water molecule interact with neighboring molecules during their excitation by a laser beam Sveta.

And thus, an unusual effect was discovered, during which hydrogen atoms attracted oxygen atoms of neighboring molecules, and then they were repelled with force.

Simple water and its complex interactions

We all know very well that each water molecule consists of a single oxygen atom and a pair of hydrogen atoms. In this case, the network of hydrogen bonds, which acts between positively charged hydrogen atoms and negatively charged oxygen atoms of neighboring molecules holds an uncountable number of water molecules together.

It is this notorious network of hydrogen bonds that is "guilty" of such mysterious properties of water, but until now scientists cannot visually verify this.

In a new scientific work, for the first time in history, engineers were able to visually observe how the reaction of the network of hydrogen bonds to the energy impulse has a critical dependence on the quantum-mechanical nature of the distribution of the hydrogen atoms in volume.

So, in the course of the experiment, to visualize the interaction, scientists used SLAC MeV-UED, which is essentially a high-speed "electronic camera ", capable of fixing minor movements of molecules due to the use of the effect of scattering of the electron flux from the considered object.

So scientists have previously created streams of water, which are only 100 nanometers thick, and illuminated them with infrared laser light, which made the molecules literally vibrate.

After that, scientists began to send short pulses of high-energy electrons to the "excited" water molecules.

So, in the course of such processing, engineers obtained images of the transforming atomic structure of molecules with a sufficiently high resolution.

After analyzing the images obtained, the engineers found that it turns out that when a water molecule enters a vibration process, its hydrogen atom initially attracts an oxygen atom of a neighboring molecule to itself, and only then repels it with a newly acquired momentum in this way, increasing the intermolecular distance.

In this case, the attraction of atoms occurred in 80 femtoseconds, and the entire process of attraction-repulsion took no more than 1 picosecond.

This research will allow a better understanding of hydrogen bonds in a seemingly simple but in fact the least studied liquid like water. And also understand the nature of many chemical reactions occurring in the solution phase.

Scientists have shared the results of the work done on the pages of the journal Nature.

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