Related papers: Dissolving salt is not equivalent to applying a pr…
Solvation of ions is ubiquitous on our planet. Solvated ions have a profound effect on the behavior of ionic solutions, which is crucial in nature and technology. Experimentally, ions have been classified into "structure makers" or…
We study ion pair dissociation in water at ambient conditions using a combination of classical and ab initio approaches. The goal of this study is to disentangle the sources of discrepancy observed in computed potentials of mean force. In…
Local polarization effects, induced by mono and divalent positive ions in water, influence (and in turn are influenced by) the large scale structural properties of the solvent. Experiments can only distinguish this process of interplay in a…
Water inherently contains trace amounts of various salts, yet the microscopic processes by which salts influence some of its physical properties remain elusive. Notably, the mechanisms that reduce the dielectric constant of water upon salt…
Life on Earth depends upon the dissolution of ionic salts in water, particularly NaCl. However, an atomistic scale understanding of the process remains elusive. Simulations lend themselves conveniently to studying dissolution since they…
Ion specificity and related Hofmeister effects, ubiquitous in aqueous systems, can have spectacular consequences in hydrated clays, where ion-specific nanoscale surface forces can determine large scale cohesive, swelling and shrinkage…
Electrical image potentials near a metallic or a dielectric wall of higher dielectric constant than that of the solution are attractive, and therefore, can concentrate salt ions near the wall. It has recently been observed that near a…
In aqueous solutions, dissolved ions interact strongly with the surrounding water, thereby modifying the solution properties in an ion-specific manner. These ion-hydration interactions can be accounted for theoretically on a mean-field…
Intermolecular correlations in liquid water at ambient conditions have generally been characterized through short range density fluctuations described through the atomic pair distribution functions (PDF). Recent numerical and experimental…
Effects of presence of ions, at moderate to high concentrations, on dynamical properties of water molecules are investigated through classical molecular dynamics simulations using two well known non-polarizable water models. Simulations…
Ionic solids and melts are compounds in which the interactions are dominated by electrostatic effects. However, the polarization of the ions also plays an important role in many respects as has been clarified in recent years thanks to the…
Phase transitions in polar binary mixtures can be drastically altered even by a small amount of salt. This is because the preferential solvation strongly depends on the ambient composition. Together with a summary of our research in this…
Electrostatic correlations between ions dissolved in water are known to impact their transport properties in numerous ways, from conductivity to ion selectivity. The effects of these correlations on the solvent itself remain, however, much…
The dielectric permittivity of salt water decreases on dissolving more salt. For nearly a century, this phenomenon has been explained by invoking saturation in the dielectric response of the solvent water molecules. Herein, we employ an…
The interaction between surface patches of proteins with different surface properties has a vital role to play driving conformational changes of proteins in different salt solutions. We demonstrate the existence of ion-specific attractive…
We present simulation results and an explanatory theory on how antagonistic salts affect the spinodal decomposition of binary fluid mixtures. We find that spinodal decomposition is arrested and complex structures form only when…
When salts are added to water, the viscosity generally increases suggesting the ions increase the strength of the water's hydrogen-bond network. However, infrared pump-probe measurements on electrolyte solutions have found that ions have no…
The solvation structures and ion dynamics of CaCl$_2$ aqueous electrolytes have been investigated using ab initio molecular dynamics simulations and molecular dynamics simulations with deep learning potentials. We found multiple solvation…
The hydrophobic effect is the dominant force which drives a protein towards its native state, but its physics has not been thoroughly understood yet. We introduce an exactly solvable model of the solvation of non-polar molecules in water,…
It will be shown that for a solution of salt dissolved in water in contact with a metallic wall, the concentration of salt ions (both positive and negative) within a few Angstroms of the wall can be large enough to exceed the solubility…