Competing factors on the frequency separation between the OH stretching modes in water
Abstract Recent simulations demonstrated that the inhomogeneous broadening as observed in the vibrational spectra of liquid water at ambient conditions can be viewed as a large vibrational splitting of symmetric and asymmetric OH stretching modes, due to the asymmetry of the local hydrogen-bonding network [J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 2013, 4(19), pp 3245–3250]. In this work, we show that the finite temperature and the liquid phase do not only modulate the local hydrogen-bonding asymmetry of water molecules, but also the intramolecular coupling strength. These two factors compete together in the determination of the overall magnitude of the frequency separation between the two OH stretching modes …
Vibrational Signature of Water Molecules in Asymmetric Hydrogen Bonding Environments
The O–H stretching vibrational modes of water molecules are sensitive to their local environments. Here, we applied effective normal-mode analysis to isolate contributions of each of the two hydrogen atoms to the vibrational modes ν1 and ν3 of water molecules in the liquid phase. We demonstrate that the decoupling of the two contributions fd and the frequency splitting of the vibrational modes Δω13 are inextricably related to the symmetry of the hydrogen bonding environment. We show that ambient liquid water modeled at the density functional level of theory exhibits the characteristics of an asymmetric environment with an average decoupling of 0.82 and a splitting of 137 inverse centimeters…