Computer Simulation Investigation of the Water−Benzene Interface in a Broad Range of Thermodynamic States from Ambient to Supercritical Conditions

Ellipsometric study of depletion at oil-water interfaces

Ellipsometry is exquisitely sensitive to density variations across a fluid-fluid interface. The coefficient of ellipticity at the interface between water and a series of nonpolar and polar oils is the opposite sign to that predicted for an interface roughened by thermal capillary waves. For pure hydrocarbons, the coefficient of ellipticity is correlated with the refractive index of the oil, but is largely independent of the molecular architecture of the oil phase, ruling out molecular alignment at the interface as the major cause of the deviation from the capillary-wave model. The introduction of a "drying" layer between the oil and water can explain the experimental data. The thickness of the drying layer, modeled as a slab with a relative permittivity of unity, was only 0.3-0.4 A, which is close to that expected simply from the hard sphere repulsion of a hydrocarbon surface. For polar oils, the coefficient of ellipticity decreases as the interfacial tension decreases, consistent with the reduction in thickness of the hard-sphere exclusion region on account of the formation of hydrogen bonds to water.

Structure of Hydrophobic Hydration of Benzene and Hexafluorobenzene from First Principles

We report on the aqueous hydration of benzene and hexafluorobenzene, as obtained by carrying out extensive (>100 ps) first principles molecular dynamics simulations. Our results show that benzene and hexafluorobenzene do not behave as ordinary hydrophobic solutes, but rather present two distinct regions, one equatorial and the other axial, that exhibit different solvation properties. While in both cases the equatorial regions behave as typical hydrophobic solutes, the solvation properties of the axial regions depend strongly on the nature of the pi-water interaction. In particular, pi-hydrogen and pi-lone pair interactions are found to dominate in benzene and hexafluorobenzene, respectively, which leads to substantially different orientations of water near the two solutes. We present atomic and electronic structure results (in terms of Maximally Localized Wannier Functions) providing a microscopic description of benzene- and hexafluorobenzene-water interfaces, as well as a comparative study of the two solutes. Our results point at the importance of an accurate description of interfacial water to characterize hydration properties of apolar molecules, as these are strongly influenced by subtle charge rearrangements and dipole moment redistributions in interfacial regions.