Water at patterned hydrophilic/hydrophobic surfaces

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The interaction of water with surfaces plays a key role at many interfaces of technological importance, either as the active species or by modifying the stability of other adsorbates. Water bound in confined environments has quite unique and potentially useful properties, for example frictionless transport of 1D chains in carbon nanotubes and molecular sieves of graphene oxide, while the ability of particular surfaces to nucleate ice plays an important role in areas as diverse as atmospheric precipitation and ice formation (inhibition) at biological interfaces. Many of these surfaces are complex, For example, ice forming proteins typically display regular linear arrays of hydrophilic and hydrophobic binding sites, with a large corrugation, but why their structure has such a unique ability to nucleate or inhibit ice formation remains unclear. This project will use surface science techniques and electronic structure calculations to examine water adsorption and ordering at interfaces containing arrays of hydrophilic/hydrophobic sites, built from both inorganic and organic species. We will seek to develop a molecular picture to describe how the corrugation and lateral ordering of the hydrophobic/hydrophilic sites influences wetting. The ultimate aim of this project will be to design a model surface to mimic an ice forming protein and understand its interface with water at the molecular level to reveal how it overcomes the large critical nucleus size for ice formation. The student will receive training in UHV scanning probe microscopy (STM and AFM) and the use of modern electronic structure calculations, with van der Waals corrections, to model water adsorption