Charge Gradients around Dendritic Voids Cause Nanoscale Inhomogeneities in Liquid Water

Water is the matrix of life and serves as a solvent for numerous physical and chemical processes. The origins of the nature of inhomogeneities that exist in liquid water and the time scales over which they occur remains an open question. Here, we report femtosecond elastic second harmonic scattering (fs-ESHS) of liquid water in comparison to an isotropic liquid (CCl₄) and show that water is indeed a nonuniform liquid. The coherent fs-ESHS intensity was interpreted, using molecular dynamics simulations, as arising from charge density fluctuations with enhanced nanoscale polarizabilities around transient voids having an average lifetime of 300 fs. Although voids were also present in CCl₄, they were not characterized by hydrogen bond defects and did not show strong polarizability fluctuations, leading to fs-ESHS of an isotropic liquid. The voids increased in number at higher temperatures above room temperature, in agreement with the fs-ESHS results.