American Physical Society, Physical Review Letters, 19(111), 2013
DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.111.193001
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High-resolution O 1s resonant inelastic x-ray scattering spectra of liquid H2O, D2O, and HDO, obtained by excitation near the preedge resonance show, in the elastic line region, well-separated multiple vibrational structures corresponding to the internal OH stretch vibration in the ground state of water. The energy of the first-order vibrational excitation is strongly blueshifted with respect to the main band in the infrared or Raman spectra of water, indicating that water molecules with a highly weakened or broken donating hydrogen bond are correlated with the preedge structure in the x-ray absorption spectrum. The vibrational profile of preedge excited HDO water is well fitted with 50%±20% greater OH-stretch contribution compared to OD, which strongly supports a preference for OH being the weakened or broken H-bond in agreement with the well-known picture that D_{2}O makes stronger H-bonds than H_{2}O. Accompanying path-integral molecular dynamics simulations show that this is particularly the case for strongly asymmetrically H-bonded molecules, i.e., those that are selected by preedge excitation.