Physicists discover new quantum state of water

[Ichingcarpenter]

Physicists discover new quantum state of water


Water's strange and life-giving qualities could be at least partly explained by quantum mechanics. That is the claim being made by a group of physicists in the UK and the US, who have made extremely sensitive measurements of the protons in tiny samples of water and have found that these protons behave very differently to those in much larger sample.

Water has a host of properties that set it apart from other substances and which make it particularly suited to sustaining life. For example, the fact that it is less dense as a solid than as a liquid and that its maximum density occurs at 4 °C, means that lakes freeze from the top-down rather than the bottom-up – something that was vital to sustaining life during ice ages.

In the latest work, George Reiter of the University of Houston and colleagues study in detail the key to water's unusual properties – the hydrogen bond. This is the bond between water molecules, connecting the oxygen atom of one molecule to the hydrogen atom in another. Hydrogen bonds are usually considered primarily as an electrostatic phenomena, in other words that water consists of discrete molecules bound to one another through positive and negative charges (residing on the hydrogen and oxygen atoms respectively). This simple picture is able to explain some of water's features, such as its structure – the predictions of the model agreeing well with the results of neutron-scattering experiments that reveal how far apart on average one oxygen atom is from the next.


http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/45037

[immoderate]

1. Can Ice-9 be far away?

--imm

[thereismore]

2. What a stupid headline. This water is confined in nanotubes and so it

isn't just water anymore, is it. And when you go small, you run into quantum phenomena. So what's the big deal I don't know.