Hydrogen Bonding and Electronic Structure of Liquid Water by X-Ray Emission Spectroscopy (XES) (CAT#: STEM-ST-0279-WXH)

Introduction

Water is the most abundant substance on our planet, and it is the principal constituent of all living organisms. Chemical reactions taking place in liquid water are essential for many important processes in electrochemistry, environmental science, pharmaceutical science, and biology in general. Many models have been proposed to view the details of how liquid water is geometrically organized by hydrogen-bond network. Hydrogen bond is an attractive interaction in a link between hydrogen atom and one of the highly electronegative and nonmetallic elements which contains a lone pair of electrons. Although H bonds are much weaker than conventional chemical bonds, they have important consequences on the properties of water. Diffraction of x rays and neutrons provides strong evidence that tetrahedral hydrogen-bond order persists beyond the melting transition, but with substantial disorder present.