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.