Dielectric Relaxation, Ion Conductivity, Solvent Rotation, and Solvation Dynamics in a Room-Temperature Ionic Liquid

Abstract

Dielectric susceptibility and related conductivity of the neat ionic liquid 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate (EMI+PF6-) are studied via molecular dynamics computer simulations. Both ion translations and reorientations contribute to dielectric relaxation, while their cross-correlation does not play any significant role. Interestingly, ion translational dynamics are found to enhance the static dielectric constant epsilon 0. The increment in epsilon 0 is attributed to rapid development of large anticorrelation in the autocorrelation function of the ionic current, i.e., hindered ion translations of strong librational character. One consequence of hindered translational dynamics is that the real part of conductivity has a maximum in the terahertz region and decreases with diminishing frequency. This in turn yields significant dielectric absorption in the far-IR region, consonant with recent terahertz time-domain spectroscopy measurements. Reorientational dynamics of cations show a marked deviation from diffusion. The well-known relation in the diffusion regime for reorientational correlation times tau R(l) proportional, variant [ l( l + 1)] (-1) fails completely for EMI+PF6-, where l is the order of Legendre polynomials used in the expansion of reorientational time correlation functions. It is found that dielectric continuum theory generally does not provide a reliable framework to describe solvation dynamics in EMI+PF6- even though the inclusion of ion conductivity in dielectric relaxation tends to improve the continuum description. This is ascribed mainly to electrostrictive effects absent in many continuum formulations.