ArticleJournal of the American Chemical Society2025
Reevaluating Anomalous Electric Fields at the Air-Water Interface: A Surface-Specific Spectroscopic Survey.
Article in Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visible light leaves evaporation and interfacial structure of neat water unchanged at the air-water interface.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Electric-field-driven COChemical science · 2026Article
- Asymmetry in Droplet Charge and HJACS Au · 2026Article
- Humidity-Driven Chloride Protonation and Surface Enrichment on Natural Salt Surfaces near Deliquescence.Environmental science & technology · 2026Article
- Structural Response of the Water Dimer to an Electric Field.ACS omega · 2026Article
- Differentiating interfacial water structures via alkali metal cation promotor for HNature communications · 2026Article
- Constructing scalable hydrophobe-water micro-interfaces for catalyst-free generation of HNature communications · 2026Article
- Halogen Bonds under Electric Field with Quantum Accuracy and Relativistic Basis Sets.The journal of physical chemistry. A · 2026Article
- Entropy Governs the Structure and Reactivity of Water Dissociation Under Electric Fields.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The notion that large electric fields at the air-water interface catalyze spontaneous chemical reactions has sparked significant debate, with far reaching implications for atmospheric chemistry and interfacial reactivity. Using vibrational sum frequency generation (SFG) spectroscopy, we test this hypothesis within the framework of this surface-specific method, comparing local electric field strengths at the air-water interface and in bulk water. By applying established vibrational frequency-to-field mappings to the OH stretch of interfacial and bulk water, we extract effective electric field distributions under ambient conditions. Contrary to prevailing claims, our SFG results reveal no spectroscopic evidence within this method for exceptionally strong or long-lived interfacial electric fields. Instead, bulk water consistently exhibits broader field distributions. The absence of key spectral signatures, such as red-shifted continua, or slowed spectral diffusion, further undermines the idea of anomalous surface fields. Our findings suggest that exceptionally large, long-lived interfacial fields are unlikely. This calls into question interpretations that attribute droplet chemistry primarily to such electric fields.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.