Clean water is vital to people, crops and livestock.
While scientists have known that molecules confined within single-walled nanotubes behave differently than their bulk counterparts, it has previously been impossible to study these interactions in a truly uniform environment. For the first time, scientists have been able to select nanotubes of the same chirality and with a very small diameter that can only be filled with one water molecule after the other, yielding a single-file chain. By studying the photoluminescence properties of empty nanotubes compared with water-filled nanotubes, researchers noticed a sudden shift in the emission color of filled nanotubes at ~150 K. Previous studies had observed more general shifts, but scientists could not determine the exact temperature of the shift and could only speculate at the cause behind the shift. In this controlled experiment, where a direct comparison was made between water-filled and empty nanotubes, researchers detected highly ordered structures of water within these nanotubes, a state that previously had only been predicted by theoretical simulations.
The group further performed molecular dynamics simulations on this system as a function of temperature. They determined that water dipole orientation is the basis of the phase transition. This finding makes room for more theory to explain the quasiphase transition while the entire study advances the understanding of confined molecules for use in studying complex natural systems and developing novel microfluidic applications.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-confined-tiny-carbon-nanotubes-extremely.html#jCp
Social Plugin