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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Probing the Structure and Dynamics of Interfacial Water with Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Spectroscopy
Published on: May 27, 2018
Time-resolved measurements of the structure of water at constant density
A M Lindenberg1, Y Acremann, D P Lowney
1Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA. aaronl@slac.stanford.edu
Abstract:
Dynamical changes in the structure factor of liquid water, S(Q,t), are measured using time-resolved x-ray diffraction techniques with 100 ps resolution. On short time scales following femtosecond optical excitation, we observe temperature-induced changes associated with rearrangements of the hydrogen-bonded structure at constant volume, before the system has had time to expand. We invert this data to extract transient changes in the pair correlation function associated with isochoric heating effects, and interpret these in terms of a decrease in the local tetrahedral ordering.
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