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Solubility

A foggy day in London dispersion town

Nature Chemistry volume 15, pages 1327–1328 (2023)Cite this article

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The factors that control the solubility of a salt are many and varied. Now a set of salts with closely related cations suggests that weak London dispersion-controlled CH···π interactions can dominate solubility, despite the presence of much stronger forces.

Dissolving a solid in a liquid solvent is a complicated process, involving a host of competing factors. To take a simple example, the dissolving of a NaCl crystal in water begins with the highly ordered lattice of the crystal, with each ion placed in close proximity to a number of ions of opposite charge. On placing this crystal in water, these stabilizing cation–anion interactions are replaced by interactions between each ion and a surrounding cluster of water molecules, each arranged to maximize the stabilizing forces. So for example, a hydrogen atom of each water molecule tends to point towards a Cl– anion. Its other proton would typically align with the oxygen atom of another water molecule, while its oxygen atom would act as a proton acceptor from a third water molecule. But again, any such arrangement is ephemeral, as the many waters shuffle around on a rapid timescale.

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Fig. 1: Factors contributing to CH···π interactions.

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  1. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA

    Steve Scheiner

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  1. Steve Scheiner
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Correspondence to Steve Scheiner.

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Scheiner, S. A foggy day in London dispersion town. Nat. Chem. 15, 1327–1328 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-023-01325-8

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