The amphiphilic osmolyte trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO) is commonly found in natural organisms, where it counteracts biochemical stress associated with urea in aqueous environments. Despite the ...important role of TMAO as osmoprotectant, the mechanism behind TMAO's action has remained elusive. Here, we study the interaction between urea, TMAO, and water in solution using broadband (100 MHz-1.6 THz) dielectric spectroscopy. We find that the previously reported tight hydrogen bonds between 3 water molecules and the hydrophilic amine oxide group of TMAO, remain intact at all investigated concentrations of urea, showing that no significant hydrogen bonding occurs between the two co-solutes. Despite the absence of direct TMAO-urea interactions, the solute reorientation times of urea and TMAO show an anomalous nonlinear increase with concentration, for ternary mixtures containing equal amounts of TMAO and urea. The nonlinear increase of the reorientation correlates with changes in the viscosity, showing that the combination of TMAO and urea cooperatively enhances the hydrogen-bond structure of the ternary solutions. This nonlinear increase is indicative of water mediated interaction between the two solutes and is not observed if urea is combined with other amphiphilic solutes.
To understand the yield and patterns of damage in aqueous condensed matter, including biological systems, it is essential to identify the initial products subsequent to the interaction of high-energy ...radiation with liquid water. Until now, the observation of several fast reactions induced by energetic particles in water was not possible on their characteristic timescales. Therefore, some of the reaction intermediates involved, particularly those that require nuclear motion, were not considered when describing radiation chemistry. Here, through a combined experimental and theoretical study, we elucidate the ultrafast proton dynamics in the first few femtoseconds after X-ray core-level ionization of liquid water. We show through isotope analysis of the Auger spectra that proton-transfer dynamics occur on the same timescale as electron autoionization. Proton transfer leads to the formation of a Zundel-type intermediate HO*···H···H2O(+), which further ionizes to form a so-far unnoticed type of dicationic charge-separated species with high internal energy. We call the process proton-transfer mediated charge separation.
Photoelectron (PE) spectroscopy measurements from liquid water and from a 4
m NaI aqueous solution are performed using a liquid microjet in combination with soft X-ray synchrotron radiation. From the ...oxygen 1s PE signal intensity from liquid water, measured as a function of photon energy (up to 1500
eV), we quantitatively determine relative electron inelastic effective attenuation lengths (EAL) for (photo)electron kinetic energies in the 70–900
eV range. In order to determine the absolute electron escape depths a calibration point is needed, which is not directly accessible by experiment. This information can instead be indirectly derived by comparing PE experiments and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of an aqueous solution interface where density profiles of water, anions, and cations are distinctively different. We have chosen sodium iodide in water because iodide has a considerable propensity for the solution surface, whereas the sodium cation is repelled from the surface. By measuring the intensities of photoelectrons emitted from different orbitals of different symmetries from each aqueous ion we also evaluate whether gas-phase ionization cross sections and asymmetry parameters can describe the photoemission from ions at and near the aqueous solution/vapor interface. We show that gas-phase data reproduce surprisingly well the experimental observations for hydrated ions as long as the photon energy is sufficiently far above the ionization threshold. Electrons detected at the higher photon energies originate predominantly from deeper layers, suggesting that bulk-solution electron elastic scattering is relatively weak.
Mixtures of water and alcohol exhibit an excess surface concentration of alcohol as a result of the amphiphilic nature of the alcohol molecule, which has important consequences for the ...physico-chemical properties of water-alcohol mixtures. Here we use a combination of intensity vibrational sum-frequency generation (VSFG) spectroscopy, heterodyne-detected VSFG (HD-VSFG), and core-level photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) to investigate the molecular properties of water-ethanol mixtures at the air-liquid interface. We find that increasing the ethanol concentration up to a molar fraction (MF) of 0.1 leads to a steep increase of the surface density of the ethanol molecules, and an increased ordering of the ethanol molecules at the surface. When the ethanol concentration is further increased, the surface density of ethanol remains more or less constant, while the orientation of the ethanol molecules becomes increasingly disordered. The used techniques of PES and VSFG provide complementary information on the density and orientation of ethanol molecules at the surface of water, thus providing new information on the molecular-scale properties of the surface of water-alcohol mixtures over a wide range of compositions. This information is invaluable in understanding the chemical and physical properties of water-alcohol mixtures.
A combination of two surface-specific spectroscopy techniques was used to gain unique insights in the molecular-scale properties of the surface of water-ethanol mixtures over a wide range of compositions.
We demonstrate the applicability of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to obtain charge- and site-specific electronic structural information of biomolecules in aqueous solution. Changing the pH of an ...aqueous solution of lysine from basic to acidic results in nitrogen 1s and carbon 1s chemical shifts to higher binding energies. These shifts are associated with the sequential protonation of the two amino groups, which affects both charge state and hydrogen bonding to the surrounding water molecules. The N1s chemical shift is 2.2 eV, and for carbon atoms directly neighboring a nitrogen the shift for C1s is ∼0.4 eV. The experimental binding energies agree reasonably with our calculated energies of lysine( aq ) for different pH values.
We investigate various mechanisms contributing to the surface ion distributions in simple and mixed aqueous alkali-halide solutions depending on the total salt concentration, using a combination of ...photoelectron spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations. In simple solutions, the surface enhancement of large polarizable anions is reduced with increasing concentration. In the case of a NaBr/NaCl mixed aqueous solution, with bromide as the minority component, the situation is more complex. While the total anion/cation charge separation is similarly reduced with increasing salt content, this alone does not uniquely determine the ion distribution due to the co-existence of two different anions, Br
−
and Cl
−
. We show that bromide is selectively surface enhanced at higher concentrations, despite the fact that the total anion surface enhancement is reduced. This phenomenon, which can be viewed as "salting out" of bromide by NaCl might have consequences for our understanding of the surface structure of mixed aqueous solutions subjected to concentration increase due to dehydration, such as seawater-born aerosols.
Photoemission experiments and MD simulations reveal important changes in the surface structure of simple and mixed salt solutions with concentration.
The local electronic structure of glycine in neutral, basic, and acidic aqueous solution is studied experimentally by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and theoretically by molecular dynamics ...simulations accompanied by first-principle electronic structure and spectrum calculations. Measured and computed nitrogen and carbon 1s binding energies are assigned to different local atomic environments, which are shown to be sensitive to the protonation/deprotonation of the amino and carboxyl functional groups at different pH values. We report the first accurate computation of core-level chemical shifts of an aqueous solute in various protonation states and explicitly show how the distributions of photoelectron binding energies (core-level peak widths) are related to the details of the hydrogen bond configurations, i.e. the geometries of the water solvation shell and the associated electronic screening. The comparison between the experiments and calculations further enables the separation of protonation-induced (covalent) and solvent-induced (electrostatic) screening contributions to the chemical shifts in the aqueous phase. The present core-level line shape analysis facilitates an accurate interpretation of photoelectron spectra from larger biomolecular solutes than glycine.
We report highly surface sensitive core-level photoelectron spectra of small carboxylic acids (formic, acetic and butyric acid) and their respective carboxylate conjugate base forms (formate, acetate ...and butyrate) in aqueous solution. The relative surface propensity of the carboxylic acids and carboxylates is obtained by monitoring their respective C1s signal intensities from a solution in which their bulk concentrations are equal. All the acids are found to be enriched at the surface relative to the corresponding carboxylates. By monitoring the PE signals of acetic acid and acetate as a function of total concentration, we find that the protonation of acetic acid is nearly complete in the interface layer. This is in agreement with literature surface tension data, from which it is inferred that the acids are enriched at the surface while (sodium) formate and acetate, but not butyrate, are depleted. For butyric acid, we conclude that the carboxylate form co-exists with the acid in the interface layer. The free energy cost of replacing an adsorbed butyric acid molecule with a butyrate ion at 1.0 M concentration is estimated to be >5 kJ mol(-1). By comparing concentration dependent surface excess data with the evolution of the corresponding photoemission signals it is furthermore possible to draw conclusions about how the distribution of molecules that contribute to the excess is altered with bulk concentration.
We study the reorientation dynamics of liquid water confined in nanometer-sized reverse micelles of spherical and cylindrical shape. The size and shape of the micelles are characterized in detail ...using small-angle x-ray scattering, and the reorientation dynamics of the water within the micelles is investigated using GHz dielectric relaxation spectroscopy and polarization-resolved infrared pump-probe spectroscopy on the OD-stretch mode of dilute HDO:H2O mixtures. We find that the GHz dielectric response of both the spherical and cylindrical reverse micelles can be well described as a sum of contributions from the surfactant, the water at the inner surface of the reversed micelles, and the water in the core of the micelles. The Debye relaxation time of the core water increases from the bulk value τ(H2O) of 8.2 ± 0.1 ps for the largest reverse micelles with a radius of 3.2 nm to 16.0 ± 0.4 ps for the smallest micelles with a radius of 0.7 nm. For the nano-spheres the dielectric response of the water is approximately ∼6 times smaller than expected from the water volume fraction and the bulk dielectric relaxation of water. We find that the dielectric response of nano-spheres is more attenuated than that of nano-tubes of identical composition (water-surfactant ratio), whereas the reorientation dynamics of the water hydroxyl groups is identical for the two geometries. We attribute the attenuation of the dielectric response compared to bulk water to a local anti-parallel ordering of the molecular dipole moments. The difference in attenuation between nano-spheres and nano-cylinders indicates that the anti-parallel ordering of the water dipoles is more pronounced upon spherical than upon cylindrical nanoconfinement.
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