- authors
- Michiel de Kock, Sana Azim, Gunther Kassier, and R. J. Dwayne Miller
- date published
- Nov. 20, 2020
- journal
- The Journal of Chemical Physics
- volume, number
- 153
- pages
- 194504
- web page
- https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0024127
- doi
- https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0024127
- note
- Selected as Featured Article in The Journal of Chemical Physics
- abstract
High energy electron scattering of liquid water (H2O) at near-ambient temperature and pressure was performed in a transmission electron microscope (TEM) to determine the radial distribution of water, which provides information on intra- and intermolecular spatial correlations. A recently developed environmental liquid cell enables formation of a stable water layer, the thickness of which is readily controlled by pressure and flow rate adjustments of a humid air stream passing between two silicon nitride (Si3N4) membranes. The analysis of the scattering data is adapted from the x-ray methodology to account for multiple scattering in the H2O:Si3N4 sandwich layer. For the H2O layer, we obtain oxygen–oxygen (O–O) and oxygen–hydrogen (O–H) peaks at 2.84 Å and 1.83 Å, respectively, in good agreement with values in the literature. This demonstrates the potential of our approach toward future studies of water-based physics and chemistry in TEMs or electron probes of structural dynamics