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Version 2
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What is the “Hydrogen Bond”? A QFT-QED Perspective
Version 1
: Received: 3 March 2024 / Approved: 4 March 2024 / Online: 5 March 2024 (07:21:05 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 6 March 2024 / Approved: 7 March 2024 / Online: 8 March 2024 (09:59:17 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 6 March 2024 / Approved: 7 March 2024 / Online: 8 March 2024 (09:59:17 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Renati, P.; Madl, P. What Is the “Hydrogen Bond”? A QFT-QED Perspective. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 3846. Renati, P.; Madl, P. What Is the “Hydrogen Bond”? A QFT-QED Perspective. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 3846.
Abstract
By this contribution we would like to briefly highlight the problems in conceiving the “Hydrogen Bond” (HB) as a real short-range, directional, electrostatic, attractive interaction and to reframe its nature through the non-approximated view of condensed matter offered by a Quantum Electro-Dynamic (QED) perspective. We focus our attention on water, as the paramount case to show the effectiveness of this 40-years’ old theoretical background, which depicts water as a two-fluid system (where one of the two phases is coherent). The HB emerge to be the result of the electromagnetic field gradient in the coherent phase of water, whose vacuum level is lower than the non-coherent (gas-like) fraction. Thus, the HB can be properly looked at, i.e. no more as a “dipolar force” among molecules, but as the phenomenological effect of their collective thermodynamic tendency to occupy a lower ground-state, compatibly with temperature and pressure. This perspective allows to account for many “anomalous” behaviours of water and to understand why the calculated energy associated to HB should change when considering two molecules (water-dimer), or the liquid state, or the several kinds of ice. The emergence of a condensed, liquid, phase at room temperature is indeed the consequence of the boson condensation as described in the framework of spontaneous symmetry breakings (SSB). The switch from a still semi-classical Quantum Mechanical (QM) in the 1st quantization to a Quantum Field Theory (QFT) view embedded in the 2nd quantization is advocated for a more realistic and authentic description of water, condensed matter and living systems.
Keywords
quantum field theory; phase; coherence; water; symmetry-breaking; dynamical order; resonance; non-thermal effects; Hydrogen bond
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Biophysics
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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