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. 2024 Jun 28;384(6703):1435-1440.
doi: 10.1126/science.ado7049. Epub 2024 Jun 6.

Electric nuclear quadrupole coupling reveals dissociation of HCl with a few water molecules

Fan Xie  1 , Denis S Tikhonov  1 , Melanie Schnell  1   2
Affiliations

Electric nuclear quadrupole coupling reveals dissociation of HCl with a few water molecules

Fan Xie et al. Science. .

Abstract

Investigating the dissociation of acids in the presence of a limited number of water molecules is crucial for understanding various elementary chemical processes. In our study, focusing on HCl(H2O)n clusters (where HCl is hydrogen chloride and H2O is water) formed in a cold and isolated jet expansion, we used the nuclear quadrupole coupling tensor obtained through rotational spectroscopy to decipher the nature of the hydrogen-chlorine (H-Cl) chemical bond in a microaqueous environment. For n = 1 to 4, the H-Cl bond is covalent. At n = 5 and 7, the contact ion pair of H3O+Cl- is spontaneously formed within the hydrogen bond networks of book and cube acid-water clusters, respectively.

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