# Electrostatics for Explorting the Nature of Water Adsorption on the Laponite Sheets' Surface

Entry by Haifei Zhang, AP 225, Fall 2009 (in progress ....)

## Overview

In this paper, the authors studies the nature of the interaction of water with laponite surfaces using the topology of the electrostatic potential using density functional theory for periodic systems as well as an uncharged sheet model. The topological analysis predicts that for uncharged surfaces the adsorption mode is such that the water molecules are adsorbed almost parallel to the surface. For laponite surfaces, where there is a net charge, the adsorption mode involves electrostatic repulsion between the negative lone pairs on the water molecules and the ones on the surface oxygen atoms. As a consequence, the water molecules bind to the surface in a perpendicular and tilted approach, minimizing the repulsive interactions. The authors also discussed the advantage of using the topology of the electrostatic potential as an efficient method to describe the electrostatic interactions between adsorbates and surfaces.

## Computational method

The electrostatic potential at $\bar r$ generated by the total charge distribution, $\rho ^{tot}$, of a periodic system is given by

$V(\bar r) = \sum\limits_n {\int {\rho ^{tot} (\bar r' - \bar R_n )} } |\bar r - \bar r'|^{ - 1} d\bar r'$

The summation extends to all direct lattice vectors, the prime on the integral sign indicating that an infinitesimal region about $\bar r = \bar r'$ is excluded from the domain of integration to avoid divergent nuclear self-interaction terms that would otherwise arise in the electrostatic energy per cell. $\rho ^{tot}$ may be decomposed into electronic and nuclear components.

V(r) was calculated by means of the CRYSTAL98 program using the Khon-Sham Hamiltonian with the gradient-corrected Perdew-Becke-Ernzerhof (PBE) exchange potential.

## Summary

the nature of the interaction of water molecules with the surface of the laponite sheets has been studied by carrying out a systematic determination of the topology of V(r) for the laponite platelet surface, water molecules, and an uncharged sheet model using ab initio density functional theory (DFT) methods for periodic systems. It is shown that the computation of the topology of V(r) provides a reliable and relatively inexpensive method (that does not require the fullgeometry optimizations of the supermolecule) of studying the nature of the interactions between adsorbates and extended surfaces. To our knowledge, this novel methodology has not been previously used to treat these systems.

## References

[1] Electrostatics for Explorting the Nature of Water Adsorption on the Laponite Sheets' Surface Yosslen Aray, Manuel Marquez, Jesus Rodriguez, Santiago Coll, Yamil Simon-Manso, Carlos Gonzalez and David A. Weitz, J. Phys. Chem. 107, 8946-8952 (2003).