Journal Article
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 114, iss. 8, pp. 1801-1805, 2017
Authors
Zhi-Tao Wang, Yang-Gang Wang, Rentao Mu, Yeohoon Yoon, Arjun Dahal, Gregory K. Schenter, Vassiliki-Alexandra Glezakou, Roger Rousseau, Igor Lyubinetsky, Zdenek Dohnálek
Abstract
Significance
Understanding how water binds and dissociates on surfaces has broad implications in a vast range of physical and chemical processes. The relative stability of molecularly and dissociatively bound water has been debated for decades on many oxide surfaces, but it has never been successfully measured. Our study describes unique instrumentation, direct measurements, and a state-of-the-art computation and theory approach that yield a detailed kinetic and dynamic description of water deprotonation equilibrium on TiO
2
(110), a prototypical surface commonly used in mechanistic studies of photocatalytic water splitting. This unique study demonstrates that the molecularly bound water on TiO
2
(110) is preferred over the surface-bound hydroxyls by only 0.035 eV.
