Dynamic permittivity of confined water under a static background field

Abstract

Molecular and collective reorientations in interfacial water are by-and-large decelerated near surfaces subjected to outgoing electric fields (pointing from surface to liquid, i.e., when the surface carries positive charge). In incoming fields at negatively charged surfaces, these rates show a nonmonotonic dependence on field strength where fastest reorientations are observed when the field alignment barely offsets the polarizing effects due to interfacial hydrogen bonding. This extremum coincides with a peak of local static permittivity. We use molecular dynamics simulations to explore the impact of background static field on high frequency AC permittivity in hydration water under an electric field mimicking the conditions inside a capacitor where one of the confinement walls is subject to an outgoing field and the other one to an incoming field. At strong static fields, the absorption peak undergoes a monotonic blue shift upon increasing field strength in both hydration layers. At intermediate fields, however, the hydration region at the wall under an incoming field (the negative capacitor plate) features a red shift coinciding with maximal static-permittivity and reorientation-rate. The shift is mostly determined by the variation of the inverse static dielectric constant as proposed for mono-exponentially decaying polarization correlations. Conversely, hydration water at the opposite (positively charged) surface features a monotonic blue shift consistent with conventional saturation. The sensitivity of absorption peaks on the field suggests that surface charge densities could be deduced from sub-THz dielectric spectroscopy experiments in porous materials when interfaces accommodate a major fraction of water contained in the system.