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Tunnelling in chiral water clusters

Protons in concert

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The transfer of protons across a high barrier only occasionally occurs through quantum-mechanical tunnelling. Low-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy shows concerted tunnelling of four protons within chiral cyclic water tetramers supported on an inert surface.

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Figure 1: Schematic of various proton-transfer processes in chiral and achiral cyclic hydrogen-bonded water tetramers, (H2O)4 — 'square ice', if periodically repeated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Christof Drechsel-Grau is in the Department of Chemistry, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, New York, New York 10003, USA,

    Christof Drechsel-Grau

  2. Dominik Marx is at the Lehrstuhl für Theoretische Chemie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany,

    Dominik Marx

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  1. Christof Drechsel-Grau
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  2. Dominik Marx
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Correspondence to Christof Drechsel-Grau or Dominik Marx.

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Drechsel-Grau, C., Marx, D. Protons in concert. Nature Phys 11, 216–218 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3269

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