Macroscopic conductivity of aqueous electrolyte solutions scales with ultrafast microscopic ion motions

Vasileios Balos, Sho Imoto, Roland R. Netz, Mischa Bonn, Douwe Jan Bonthuis (), Yuki Nagata () and Johannes Hunger ()
Additional contact information
Vasileios Balos: Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
Sho Imoto: Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
Roland R. Netz: Freie Universität Berlin
Mischa Bonn: Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
Douwe Jan Bonthuis: Freie Universität Berlin
Yuki Nagata: Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
Johannes Hunger: Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Despite the widespread use of aqueous electrolytes as conductors, the molecular mechanism of ionic conductivity at moderate to high electrolyte concentrations remains largely unresolved. Using a combination of dielectric spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations, we show that the absorption of electrolytes at ~0.3 THz sensitively reports on the local environment of ions. The magnitude of these high-frequency ionic motions scales linearly with conductivity for a wide range of ions and concentrations. This scaling is rationalized within a harmonic oscillator model based on the potential of mean force extracted from simulations. Our results thus suggest that long-ranged ionic transport is intimately related to the local energy landscape and to the friction for short-ranged ion dynamics: a high macroscopic electrolyte conductivity is thereby shown to be related to large-amplitude motions at a molecular scale.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15450-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-15450-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15450-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().