Diffusion Kinetics for Methanol in Polycrystalline Ice

Water accommodation on ice and organic surfaces: insights from environmental molecular beam experiments

Water uptake on aerosol and cloud particles in the atmosphere modifies their chemistry and microphysics with important implications for climate on Earth. Here, we apply an environmental molecular beam (EMB) method to characterize water accommodation on ice and organic surfaces. The adsorption of surface-active compounds including short-chain alcohols, nitric acid, and acetic acid significantly affects accommodation of D2O on ice. n-Hexanol and n-butanol adlayers reduce water uptake by facilitating rapid desorption and function as inefficient barriers for accommodation as well as desorption of water, while the effect of adsorbed methanol is small. Water accommodation is close to unity on nitric-acid- and acetic-acid-covered ice, and accommodation is significantly more efficient than that on the bare ice surface. Water uptake is inefficient on solid alcohols and acetic acid but strongly enhanced on liquid phases including a quasi-liquid layer on solid n-butanol. The EMB method provides unique information on accommodation and rapid kinetics on volatile surfaces, and these studies suggest that adsorbed organic and acidic compounds need to be taken into account when describing water at environmental interfaces.

Some fundamental properties and reactions of ice surfaces at low temperatures

Ice surfaces offer a unique chemical environment in which reactions occur quite differently from those in liquid water or gas phases. In this article, we examine the basic properties of ice surfaces below the surface premelting temperature and discuss some of the recent investigations carried out on reactions at the ice surfaces. The static and dynamic properties of an ice surface as a reaction medium, such as its structure, molecule diffusion and proton transfer dynamics, and the surface preference of hydronium and hydroxide ions, are discussed in relation to the reactivity of the surface.

A new modeling tool for the diffusion of gases in ice or amorphous binary mixture in the polar stratosphere and the upper troposphere

Abstract. To elaborate stratospheric ozone depletion processes, measurements of diffusion coefficients of selected gas phase molecules (i.e. HCl, CH3OH, HCOOH and CH3COOH; Katsambas et al., 1997; Kondratyev and Varotsos, 1996; Varotsos et al., 1994, 1995) in ice in the temperature range 170–195 K have been analyzed with respect to the mechanisms and rates of diffusion. It is argued that the diffusion in ice of these compounds is governed by a vacancy – mediated mechanism, i.e. H2O vacancies are required to diffuse to lattice sites adjacent to these compounds prior to the diffusion of the corresponding molecule into the vacancy sites. In addition, we show that the diffusion coefficients of these compounds exhibit a specific interconnection, i.e. a linear relationship holds between the logarithm of the pre-exponential factor, Do, and the activation energy E. The physical meaning of this interconnection is discussed.