Additional resources and features associated with this article are available within the HTML version: • Supporting Information • Access to high resolution figures • Links to articles and content related to this article • Copyright permission to reproduce figures and/or text from this article With Benjamin Franklin's oil on water experiments as a historical example, people have long been fascina...

We established the charge and structure of the oil/water interface by combining ζ-potential measurements, sum frequency scattering (SFS) and molecular dynamics simulations. The SFS experiments show that the orientation of water molecules can be followed on the oil droplet/water interface. The average water orientation on a neat oil droplet/water interface is the same as the water orientation on...

We explore anion-induced interface fluctuations near protein-water interfaces using coarse-grained representations of interfaces as proposed by Willard and Chandler ( J. Phys. Chem. B 2010 , 114 , 1954 - 1958 ). We use umbrella sampling molecular dynamics to compute potentials of mean force along a reaction coordinate bridging the state where the anion is fully solvated and one where it is bias...

A new and direct approach to verify surface heterogeneity as the microscopic origin of contact-angle hysteresis is demonstrated. IR-visible sum-frequency-generation spectroscopy (SFG) was used to selectively probe the molecules at the interface of an alkyl-side-chain polymer [poly(vinyl n-octadecyl carbamate-co-vinyl acetate)] with water. The spectra indicate that in contact with water, the pol...

DNA polymerases slide on DNA during replication, and the interface must be mobile for various conformational changes. The role of lubricant interfacial water is not understood. In this report, we systematically characterize the water dynamics at the interface and in the active site of a tight binding polymerase (pol β) in its binary complex and ternary state using tryptophan as a local optical ...

We investigated the self-assembly of cyclodextrin (CD) molecules at the tetradecane–aqueous solution interface through formation of inclusion complexes (ICs). We studied the surface activity of CDs at both the air–water and the oil–water interface. Although a-CD and b-CD are not surface active at the air–water interface, they form pseudo-surfactants as inclusion complexes with linear oil molecu...

Knowledge of the interfacial water structure is essential for a basic understanding of the many environmental, technological, and biophysical systems in which aqueous interfaces appear. Using ultrafast two-dimensional surface-specific vibrational spectroscopy we show that the structure of heavy water at the water-air interface displays short-lived heterogeneity and is very different from that a...

Molecular-dynamics simulations were performed to model the effect of added salt ions on the liquid-liquid interface in a partially miscible system. Simulations of the interface between saturated phases of a model 1-hexanol+water system show a bilayer structure of 1-hexanol molecules at the interface with -OH heads of the first layer directed into the water phase and the opposite orientation for...