Faraday Discussion 141: Water - From Interfaces to the Bulk
Topics: Physical Chemistry, Surface Chemistry, Keywords: see below
Date: /27/28/29/ August 2008, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, Europe
Web Site, Contact: conferences@rsc.org
Official Information:
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!

