The variety of states of adsorbed water in heterogeneous materials and their dielectric response

Whenever water interacts with another dipolar or charged entity, there exists a broadening of its dielectric relaxation peak. Often this broadening can be described by the phenomenological Cole-Cole (CC) spectral function. A new approach has been recently presented (A. Puzenko, P. Ben Ishai, and Y. Feldman, Phys. Rev. Letters 105, 037601-4 (2010)), which is based on the fractal nature of the time set of the interaction of the relaxing water dipoles with their encompassing matrix. It demonstrates a fundamental connection between the relaxation time, τ, the broadening parameter, α, and the Kirkwood-Froehlich correlation function B. The parameters B, τ and α were chosen as the coordinates of the new 3D space, wherein the evolution of the relaxation process, as a result of the variation of external macroscopic parameters (temperature, pressure etc.), will depict a trajectory. This trajectory is a result of the connection between the kinetic and the structural properties of water in the complex system. © 2013 American Institute of Physics.