水在众多软物质体系中扮演着非常重要的角色，研究受限/界面水的微观结构和相关动力学过程对于理解和操控软物质体系的新奇特性有着关键的作用。近年来人们发现要理解水的复杂性，必须要考虑氢键的量子特性，由于氢核的质量很小，其量子隧穿和量子涨落在室温下都会很明显。水的核量子效应研究的传统手段是谱学和衍射技术，然而这些技术由于空间分辨力不够，得到的信息往往是众多氢键叠加在一起之后的平均效应，核量子态与局域环境之间的耦合会导致非常严重的谱线展宽效应，从而无法对核量子效应进行精确、定量的表征。本项目将通过研发对核量子态敏感的新型扫描探针技术，力争突破传统实验手段的限制，将受限/界面水的核量子效应研究的精度推向原子尺度。结合全量子化模拟计算，在微观上阐明氢键相互作用的量子本质，从全新的角度理解受限/界面水体系的结构、动力学和新奇物性，为发现和设计基于受限/界面水的新型功能材料、药物、能源等奠定基础。

Water plays an important role in a broad range of soft matter systems. The structure and dynamics of confined/interfacial water is crucial for understanding and controlling the novel properties of soft matter systems. Recently it has been realized that the complexity of water is related to the nuclear quantum effects (NQEs) of hydrogen bonds (H-bonds). The quantum tunneling and quantum fluctuation of the H nuclei becomes prominent even at room temperature due to its small mass. Conventional methods for probing the NQEs are based on spectroscopic or diffraction techniques. However, those techniques have poor spatial resolution and only measure the average properties of many H-bonds, which are susceptible to the structural inhomogeneity and local environments. The spatial variation and inter-bond coupling of the H-bonds lead to spectral broadening that may easily smear out the subtle details of NQEs. Here we propose to develop new-generation scanning probe microscopy with high sensitivity to nuclear quantum states, based on a new type of qPlus sensor. We aim to push the real-space study of NQEs on water down to atomic scale. Combined with state-of-the-arts full quantum simulations, we hope to reveal the quantum nature of the hydrogen bond in a quantitative way and shed light on the structure, dynamics and macroscopic properties of confined/interfacial water from a new perspective. It is promising that the research carried out by those unique techniques may form the basis for the design of novel materials, energy and medicines based on the confined/interfacial water.