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Updated: Feb 3, 2026

Probing the Structure and Dynamics of Interfacial Water with Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Spectroscopy
Published on: May 27, 2018
Structure and dynamics of water on the forsterite surface
Tingting Liu1, Siddharth Gautam, Hsiu-Wen Wang
1School of Earth Sciences, The Ohio State University, 125 South Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. Liu.2189@osu.edu.
Abstract:
The behavior of water on mineral surfaces is the key to understanding interfacial and chemical reaction processes. Olivine is one of the major rock-forming minerals and its interaction with water is a ubiquitous phenomenon both on Earth's surface and in the subsurface. This work presents a combined study using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and quasi-elastic neutron scattering (QENS) experiments conducted using three different instruments to study the structure and dynamics of water on the forsterite (Mg-end member of olivine) surface at 270 K. A combination of three different QENS instruments probes dynamical processes occurring across a broad range of time scales (∼1 ps to ∼1 ns in this study). The water structure on the hydroxylated surface is composed of three distinct water layers, transitioning from well-ordered and nearly immobile closest to the surface to a less structured layer. The energies of three motions (including translation and rotation) derived from simulations agree well with the experiments, covering the energy range from a few to hundreds of micro electron volts.
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