Abstract
WATER has been studied more extensively than any other liquid, yet its microscopic properties remain poorly understood. The difficulty in obtaining a rigorous molecular-scale description of water structure is largely a consequence of the extended, dynamic hydrogen-bonded network that exists throughout the liquid1. Studies of the structure and dynamics of isolated small clusters of water molecules2–6 provide a means of quantifying the intermolecular forces and hydrogen-bond rearrangements that occur in condensed phases. Experiments2–7 and theory8 strongly suggest that the water trimer, tetramer and pentamer have cyclic minimum energy structures. Larger water clusters are expected8 to have three-dimensional geometries, with the hexamer representing the transition from cyclic to such three-dimensional structures. Here we report investigations by terahertz laser vibration–rotation tunnelling spectroscopy3 of the structure of the water hexamer. A comparison of our results with quantum Monte Carlo simulations of this species suggests that the most stable form of (H2O)6 is indeed a cage-like structure, held together by eight hydrogen bonds (Fig. 1).
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Liu, K., Brown, M., Carter, C. et al. Characterization of a cage form of the water hexamer. Nature 381, 501–503 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1038/381501a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/381501a0
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