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Updated: Jun 27, 2026

Probing the Structure and Dynamics of Interfacial Water with Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Spectroscopy
Published on: May 27, 2018
Kinetics of hydrogen-bond rearrangements in bulk water
1Laboratoire de Chimie Physique, Université de Paris-Sud XI, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France. kafui.tay@lcp.u-psud.fr
Abstract:
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the kinetics of hydrogen-bond rearrangements in bulk water at ambient temperatures. Configurational analyses reveal three distinct bond-breaking processes, two of which constitute rearrangements in the hydrogen-bond network. The kinetic analyses demonstrate the applicability of simple first-order kinetics and reveal a large breadth of time-scales. In agreement with experiments we find that transitions between stable hydrogen-bonded configurations are characterised by an unstable, transient, non-bonded configuration. The overall rate of hydrogen-bond rearrangements is determined as 0.89 ps(-1) (1.12 ps), in very good agreement with experimental estimates.
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