Halide-Induced Cooperative Acid–Base Behavior at a Negatively Charged Interface
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using second harmonic generation and sum frequency generation spectroscopy, we monitor the influence of sodium and potassium halides on acid–base processes at the negatively charged silica/aqueous electrolyte interface. We find that the two types of acidic silanols at the surface are very sensitive to the presence of halides in the aqueous phase. As the halide size increases, the pH at which half the more acidic sites are deprotonated (pH 0.5 ) shifts to lower pH. Conversely, the pH 0.5 of the less acidic sites shifts to higher pH with increasing halide size. We also observe titration curves of increasing sharpness as the halide size increases, indicative of positive cooperativity. Using a simple cooperative model, we find that the cooperative unit for the dissociation of more acidic surface sites is ∼1, 2, and 3 for the chloride, bromide, and iodide electrolytes, respectively, which reveals that the larger anions promote deprotonation among the more acidic silanol groups. We also find that the fraction of more acidic sites, proportional to the relative surface charge density at neutral pH, increases from 20% to 86% as the sodium halide is varied from chloride to iodide. As the percentage of more acidic sites and the surface charge at neutral pH increases, the effective acidity of the less acidic sites decreases, indicating that greater surface charge density renders the remaining silanol groups more difficult to deprotonate. As the relative amount of less acidic sites increases, their deprotonation events exhibit negative, rather than positive, cooperativity revealing charge repulsion between neighboring silanol groups.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".