Abstract
In 1893 Sir William Armstrong placed a cotton thread between two wine glasses filled with chemically pure water. After applying a high voltage, a watery connection formed, and after some time, the cotton thread was pulled into one of the glasses, leaving a rope of water suspended between the two glasses. Although being a very simple experiment, it is of special interest since it comprises a number of phenomena currently tackled in modern water science like electrolysis-less charge transport and nanobubbles. This work gives some background information about water research in general and describes the water bridge phenomenon from the viewpoint of different fields such as electrohydrodynamics and quantum field theory. It is shown that the investigation of the floating water bridge led to new discoveries about water, both in the macroscopic and microscopic realm – but these were merely “hidden” in that sense that they only become evident upon application of electric fields.
Highlights
Water Properties and StructureWater is undoubtedly the most important chemical substance of the world
From a theoretical point of view, the difficulties in understanding liquid water can probably be attributed to two features: cooperative hydrogen bonding
From a quantum mechanical point of view, density functional theory indicates that an electric field would stretch the intermolecular hydrogen bonds in the water network, eventually breaking the three dimensional morphologies to form linear, branched, or netlike structures, resulting in dipolar water monomers aligning along the field axis [135,136] which coincides with the water bridge axis
Summary
Water is undoubtedly the most important chemical substance of the world. Despite this, and in spite of the fact that it is practically ubiquitous, it still represents one of the best explored [1,2] and yet least understood substances [3,4,5], as its so-called "anomalies" are famous (e.g., [6,7,8]). For detailed up-to-date structural analyses of water based on neutron scattering and/or X-ray diffraction, reference is made to the works of Teixeira and Luzar [37] and Soper (e.g., [38,39]), exemplary studies on supercooled water as well as a possible liquid-liquid phase transition were published by Stanley et al [40,41,42], Mishima and Stanley [43] and Yamada et al [44] (and references quoted therein). A novel approach in water modelling was recently presented by Molinero and Moore [49], where water is simulated as a fictional intermediate element between carbon and silicon exploiting their common feature of forming tetrahedrally coordinated units This model departs from the prevailing paradigm in water modeling which uses long-ranged electrostatic forces to produce a short-ranged hydrogen-bonded structure since it comprises only short-range interactions.
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