Anomalously low dielectric constant of confined water

We report local capacitance measurements for water confined between two atomically flat walls separated by various distances down to 1 nanometer. Our experiments reveal the presence of an interfacial layer with vanishingly small polarization such that its out-of-plane is only ~2. The electrically dead layer is found to be two to three molecules thick. These results provide much-needed feedback for theories describing water-mediated surface interactions and the behavior of interfacial water, and show a way to investigate the dielectric properties of other fluids and solids under extreme confinement.

Source: ScienceNOW - June 21, 2018 Category: Science Authors: Fumagalli, L., Esfandiar, A., Fabregas, R., Hu, S., Ares, P., Janardanan, A., Yang, Q., Radha, B., Taniguchi, T., Watanabe, K., Gomila, G., Novoselov, K. S., Geim, A. K. Tags: Physics, Applied reports Source Type: news