Liquid water fails to keep ions apart

Friday, October 10, 2014 - 07:30 in Physics & Chemistry

When hydrochloric acid is added to water, the positively and negatively charged ions don't flee from each other, according to scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. Conventional wisdom said the ions quickly separate; however, the separation is based on how acids behave in low concentrations. Here, scientists used laboratory experiments and computational simulations to determine that the negatively charged counter ions or Cl- and the positively charged hydrogen ions or H+ stick closer to each other than expected in liquid water.

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