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Nature 445, 831-832 (22 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/445831a; Published online 21 February 2007

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Physical chemistry: Oil on troubled waters

David Chandler1

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The nature of the boundary between water and oil is crucial to many nanometre-scale assembly processes, including protein folding. But until now, what the interface really looks like remained in dispute.

At the boundary between liquid water and water vapour, an interface forms that is marked by an area of lower-than-average density. The same sort of 'depletion layer' also occurs when water comes into contact with a sufficiently large hydrophobic surface — oil, in the most notorious instance, and various other organic molecules.

  1. David Chandler is in the Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
    Email: chandler@cchem.berkeley.edu

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