Water at the molecular frontier
Abstract
Much of the water that matters most - flowing through biological cells and membranes, percolating through soils and rocks, or processed by filtration and desalination technologies - is not bulk water. It is water in nano- and molecular-scale confinement or at interfaces. Nanoscale water is therefore central to many challenges of our time, from the global water crisis and the water-energy nexus to catalysis, electrochemistry, and health. Beyond its applications, nanoscale water has emerged as a rich scientific field in its own right: discoveries are accumulating rapidly, revealing that confinement and interfacial forces produce a range of behaviours absent in the bulk. Sometimes this amounts to a renormalization of bulk properties; in other cases, new and non-intuitive phenomena emerge - exotic phases, anomalous transport, and dielectric responses that defy continuum expectations. A convergence of atomically precise nanofluidic devices, novel spectroscopies and microscopy approaches, and machine-learning-accelerated simulations is now exposing the molecular mechanisms behind these behaviours. This Perspective argues that the recent findings should not be viewed as isolated nanoscale anomalies, but as evidence for a molecular regime of water in which continuum descriptions must be rethought and molecular-level understanding becomes essential. Recognising and exploring this regime should have consequences ranging from fundamental physics to the rational design of future technologies that rely on water and dissolved ions.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{bonn2026water,
title = {{Water at the molecular frontier}},
author = {Mischa Bonn and Marie-Laure Bocquet and Andre Geim and Laura Fumagalli and Angelos Michaelides and Lyderic Bocquet},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.37581},
eprint = {2610.37581},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37581},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Water at the molecular frontier
AU - Mischa Bonn
AU - Marie-Laure Bocquet
AU - Andre Geim
AU - Laura Fumagalli
AU - Angelos Michaelides
AU - Lyderic Bocquet
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.37581
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37581
AB - Much of the water that matters most - flowing through biological cells and membranes, percolating through soils and rocks, or processed by filtration and desalination technologies - is not bulk water. It is water in nano- and molecular-scale confinement or at interfaces. Nanoscale water is therefore central to many challenges of our time, from the global water crisis and the water-energy nexus to catalysis, electrochemistry, and health. Beyond its applications, nanoscale water has emerged as a rich scientific field in its own right: discoveries are accumulating rapidly, revealing that confinement and interfacial forces produce a range of behaviours absent in the bulk. Sometimes this amounts to a renormalization of bulk properties; in other cases, new and non-intuitive phenomena emerge - exotic phases, anomalous transport, and dielectric responses that defy continuum expectations. A convergence of atomically precise nanofluidic devices, novel spectroscopies and microscopy approaches, and machine-learning-accelerated simulations is now exposing the molecular mechanisms behind these behaviours. This Perspective argues that the recent findings should not be viewed as isolated nanoscale anomalies, but as evidence for a molecular regime of water in which continuum descriptions must be rethought and molecular-level understanding becomes essential. Recognising and exploring this regime should have consequences ranging from fundamental physics to the rational design of future technologies that rely on water and dissolved ions.
ER -