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Faraday Discussion 141: Water - From Interfaces to the Bulk

Topic: Physical Chemistry, Surface Chemistry Keywords: see below

Date: /27/28/29/ August 2008, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, Europe

Web Site, Contact: conferences@rsc.org

Official Informations:

Water is perhaps the most important chemical substance known. Without it, the very existence of life would be questionable. Yet its detailed structure and behaviour in the condensed phase and the interfaces between the condensed phase and its environment remain somewhat controversial:

* Recent X-ray absorption studies on liquid water have been interpreted in terms of rings and chains of water molecules that other techniques, both theoretical and empirical, have failed to observe
* The structure of water layers at metal surfaces remains a topic of considerable debate since high quality quantum chemical calculations indicated a mixed water/hydroxyl layer could be used to interpret structural observations on ice layers on ruthenium while spectroscopic observations provided no evidence for such a mixed adlayer
* While the gas phase water cluster community has provided detailed experimental and theoretical pictures of the behaviour of small water clusters, the problem remains that none of the existing interaction potentials for water can adequately describe its phase and interface behaviour fully.

Indeed as ever more sophisticated and novel experimental and theoretical tools are applied to the study of bulk liquid water and ice and its interfaces, it is becoming increasingly clear that this disparate information could heat the debate on the phase and interface behaviour of water rather than cool it!