Letter
Nature 455, 89-91 (4 September 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature07252; Received 30 November 2007; Accepted 9 July 2008
Interaction between liquid water and hydroxide revealed by core-hole de-excitation
Emad F. Aziz1, Niklas Ottosson1,2, Manfred Faubel3, Ingolf V. Hertel4,5 & Bernd Winter4,6
- BESSY GmbH, Albert-Einstein-Strasse 15, D-12489 Berlin, Germany
- Department of Physics, Uppsala University, SE-75121 Uppsala, Sweden
- Max-Planck-Institut für Dynamik und Selbstorganisation, Bunsenstrasse 10, D-37073 Göttingen, Germany
- Max-Born-Institut für Nichtlineare Optik und Kurzzeitspektroskopie, Max-Born-Strasse 2a, D-12489 Berlin, Germany
- Institut für Experimentalphysik, Freie Universität Berlin, Arnimallee 14, D-14195 Berlin, Germany
- Present address: BESSY GmbH, Albert-Einstein-Strasse 15, D-12489 Berlin, Germany.
Correspondence to: Bernd Winter4,6 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to B.W. (Email: bernd.winter@bessy.de).
The hydroxide ion plays an important role in many chemical and biochemical processes in aqueous solution1. But our molecular-level understanding of its unusual and fast transport in water, and of the solvation patterns that allow fast transport, is far from complete. One proposal seeks to explain the properties and behaviour of the hydroxide ion by essentially regarding it as a water molecule that is missing a proton2, and by inferring transport mechanisms and hydration structures from those of the excess proton. A competing proposal invokes instead unique and interchanging hydroxide hydration complexes, particularly the hypercoordinated OH-(H2O)4 species and tri-coordinated OH-(H2O)3 that can form a transient hydrogen bond between the H atom of the OH- and a neighbouring water molecule3, 4, 5. Here we report measurements of core-level photoelectron emission and intermolecular Coulombic decay6, 7, 8 for an aqueous hydroxide solution, which show that the hydrated hydroxide ion is capable of transiently donating a hydrogen bond to surrounding water molecules. In agreement with recent experimental studies of hydroxide solutions9, 10, 11, 12, our finding thus supports the notion that the hydration structure of the hydroxide ion cannot be inferred from that of the hydrated excess proton.
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