Specific Na+ and K+ Cation Effects on the Interfacial Water Molecules at the Air/Aqueous Salt Solution Interfaces Probed with Non-resonant Second Harmonic Generation (SHG)

TL;DR

This study uses polarization-dependent SHG to investigate how different Na+ and K+ salts affect the structure and orientation of interfacial water molecules, revealing unexpected specific ion effects at the air/water interface.

Contribution

It provides the first quantitative analysis of ion-specific effects on interfacial water structure using SHG, challenging existing models that treat these ions as non-polarizable hard spheres.

Findings

Interfacial water layer thickness increases with salt addition.

Na+ and K+ ions have opposite effects on water molecule orientation.

Ion pairing may influence interfacial water structure.

Abstract

Here we report the polarization dependent non-resonant second harmonic generation (SHG) measurement of the interfacial water molecules at the aqueous solution of the following salts: NaF, NaCl, NaBr, KF, KCl, and KBr. Through quantitative polarization analysis of the SHG data,the orientational parameter D value and the relative surface density of the interfacial water molecules at these aqueous solution surfaces were determined. From these results we found that addition of each of the six salts caused increase of the thickness of the interfacial water layer at the surfaces to a certain extent. Noticeably, both the cations and the anions contributed to the changes, and the abilities to increase the thickness of the interfacial water layer were in the following order: KBr > NaBr > KCl > NaCl ~ NaF > KF. Since these changes can not be factorized into individual anion and cation contributions, there are possible ion pairing or association effects, especially for the NaF case. We also found that the orientational parameter D values of the interfacial water molecules changed to opposite directions for the aqueous solutions of the three sodium salts versus the aqueous solutions of the three potassium salts. These findings clearly indicated unexpected specific Na+ and K+ cation effects at the aqueous solution surface. These effects were not anticipated from the recent molecular dynamics (MD) simulation results, which concluded that the Na+ and K+ cations can be treated as small non-polarizable hard ions and they are repelled from the aqueous interfaces. These results suggest that the electrolyte aqueous solution surfaces are more complex than the currently prevalent theoretical and experimental understandings.