A team of scientists has uncovered new molecular properties of water—a discovery of a phenomenon that had previously gone unnoticed.
Liquid water is known to be an excellent transporter of its own autoionization products; that is, the charged species obtained when a water molecule (H2O) is split into protons (H+) and hydroxide ions (OH−). This remarkable property of water makes it a critical component in emerging electrochemical energy production and storage technologies such as fuel cells; indeed, life itself would not be possible if water did not possess this characteristic.
Water is known to consist an intricate network of weak, directional interactions known as hydrogen bonds. For nearly a century, it was thought that the mechanisms by which water transports the H+ and OH− ions were mirror images of each other – identical in all ways except for directions of the hydrogen bonds involved in the process.