Water molecules interact strongly “using” both the long range dipole-dipole and short-range “hydrogen bonds” to form sophisticated networks. As described in our previous post, water molecules align along a hydrophobic surface and form an strongly-interacting 2d system of molecular dipoles. Normally there is no true...

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The true picture of the water molecules ordering next to a hydrophobic surface or a liquid-gas interface is in fact more complicated than a model. Next to the interface both the water polarization and the density should vanish. To account for the density changes we incorporated the density variations into the free energy functional. The resulting model even though only in the mean field approximation reveals spontaneous liquid polarization at the liquid boundary. The spontaneous polarization of the liquid is the consequence of the dipole-dipole interactions and effectively makes the liquid interface behave as a ferro-electric film.

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