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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Probing the Structure and Dynamics of Interfacial Water with Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Spectroscopy
Published on: May 27, 2018
A direct measurement of the dissociation energy of water
Pavlo Maksyutenko1, Thomas R Rizzo, Oleg V Boyarkin
1Laboratoire de Chimie Physique Moléculaire, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Abstract:
We have performed a direct measurement of one of the most fundamental thermochemical values: the O-H bond energy in water. Using a triple-resonance laser excitation scheme, we excite the molecule through a series of vibrational overtone transitions to access directly the onset of the dissociative continuum. The dissociation energy obtained from our experiments, 41145.94+/-0.15 cm(-1), is approximately 30 times more accurate than the currently accepted value and has important implications for other thermochemical quantities linked to the bond energy of water.
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