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American Physical Society, Physical Review Letters, 2(101)

DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.101.020602

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Water Polarization under Thermal Gradients

Journal article published in 2008 by Fernando Bresme, Anders Lervik ORCID, Dick Bedeaux, Signe Kjelstrup ORCID
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

We investigate the response of bulk liquid water to a temperature gradient using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. It is shown that the thermal gradient polarizes water in the direction of the gradient, leading to a non-negligible electrostatic field whose origin lies in the water reorientation under nonequilibrium conditions. The dependence of the magnitude of the electrostatic field with the temperature gradient is in agreement with nonequilibrium thermodynamics theory. We conclude that temperature gradients of the order of 10(8) K/m could result in fairly large polarizations approximately 10(6) V/m.