WFU Physics Colloquium

TITLE: Water in Nanoconfined Structures

SPEAKER: Professor Yue Wu ,

TIME: Wednesday November 10, 2010 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: Room 101 Olin Physical Laboratory

Interaction of water with materials plays a vital role in our daily lives. It also presents many fascinating questions for scientists to entertain. Take hydrophobicity as an example, a dew drop rolling off a lotus leaf is a vivid demonstration of the hydrophobic effect. Graphite surface is also well-known for its hydrophobicity. Is then carbon nanotube hydrophobic? This talk will address this question including in related materials [1]. Another seeming different but related system of vital interest is proteins. We all know the importance of hydration for protein functions such as enzymatic activities. It turns out, surprisingly, that we are still quite a distance away from reaching full understanding of water-protein interactions. I will discuss what we have learned from adsorption studies using nuclear magnetic resonance as a primary tool. I will discuss some new insight into the free energy of the water-protein system based on such NMR investigation. These examples illustrate that NMR is a very useful tool for addressing thermodynamic properties based investigations on atomic to nanoscales.

[1] "Temperature-Induced Hydrophobic-Hydrophilic Transition Observed by Water Adsorption" Hai-Jing Wang, Xue-Kui Xi, Alfred Kleinhammes, and Yue Wu, Science 322, 80-83 (2008).