Inspired by my last post on the transport of water vapor in plants, I decided to take a crack at the geometry and topology of this phenomenon.
To begin with, I had to ditch my cigar-shaped model of water. Not necessarily because it was wrong, but because I couldn’t easily describe it mathematically through hydrogen bonding.
Instead, I decided to figure out the simplest way to describe the geometry of water vapor inside the nano-sized triangular pores in plants. I decided that the simplest way is to look for the analogy of carbon nanotubes.
As the name says, carbon nanotubes are quite different chemically, as they are made of carbon, and they are made by strong covalent bonds. The carbon atoms are also aligned in a hexagonal grid, like this:
But apart from these things, carbon nanotubes aren’t that different to the shape of water vapor in plants.
So if there isn’t carbon in the nanotubes, covalently bound into hexagons, what are there? Well there are water molecules, made of oxygen and hydrogen, hydrogen bonded to each other, most probably in a square lattice. And why square? Because there’s actual (computational) evidence of such structure of water under nanoconfinement. See the purple box on the bottom left:
But if matter is arranged into helices, what would a this square water look like? Well, I can’t be sure, but this is a good first guess:
Apologies for the image being a bit rough still. It was easier to model water molecules as having an angle of 90 degrees between the hydrogen atoms, instead of the actual 104.5 degrees. Also, the distance between the water molecules was just guessed from the above square water image. And if you look closely, the molecules don’t fit the grid perfectly and there are missing hydrogen balls and extra artefacts.
But all these kinks are just because this is pretty much the first image. They can be corrected, if I just work on it. So, is there anything here that is objectionable? Not to my understanding. If there already wasn’t the existing work on square ice, I’d probably need to convince people more, but now I don’t really need to introduce anything new.
I’d be tempted to call this a cool picture, but I can’t yet. Perhaps I can, when I’ve corrected all of my errors.
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