Using an AFM tip sensitive to water, we tracked the spatial distributions of water films on minerals. We thank the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for access to its facilities through a User grant.

You can find our paper here:
Yalcin SE, Legg BA, Yeşilbaş M, Malvankar NS, Boily JF. 2020. Direct observation of anisotropic growth of water films on minerals driven by defects and surface tension. Sci. Adv. 6, eaaz9708

In the news: Smart Water Magazine, Phys.org, Yale U., UmU, News Beezer, aitnews, Today Headline, Forskning.se, My News Desk

Using vibrational spectroscopy and simulations we resolved the enigmatic surface chemistry of ferrihydrite. Three ways to learn more about our work:

1. The paper: Boily JF & Song X. 2020 Direct identification of reaction sites on ferrihydrite. Nat. Comm. Chem. DOI 10.1038/s42004-020-0325-y​.
2. Nature’s blog site, with the story behind this paper.
3. Goldschmidt conference: PDF of virtual presentation. Also a Q&A session on June 23rd.

In a collaboration between the JF Boily group and the Allan Bertram group of UBC, we show that K+ is the key ion driving ice nucleation on K-feldspar, an important part of atmospheric mineral dust. Read the paper here:

Merve (Ph.D. 2018, Umeå U.), a VR- and NASA-supported postdoc at SETI, won this
award for her designing a project to explore frozen environments on Mars:

Two new papers in collaboration with Stina Jansson  and J-F Boily of UmU now out in Environmental Science and Pollution Research:

Niinipuu M, Latham KG, Boily J-F, Bergknut M, Jansson S. 2020 The impact of hydrothermal carbonization on the surface functionalities of wet waste materials for water treatment applications. Env. Sci. Poll. Res. doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-08591-w

Niinipuu M, Bergknut M, Boily J-F, Rosenbaum E, Jansson S. 2020 Influence of water matrix and hydrochar properties on removal of organic and inorganic contaminants. Env. Sci. Poll. Res.  doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-09164-7

Energetics of paramagnetic oxide clusters: the Fe(III) oxyhydroxy Keggin ion

Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2020, DOI: 10.1039/C9CP05795A. Link

C. A. Ohlin

Abstract: The energetics of the different spin states of the five Baker-Figgis isomers of the iron(III) Keggin ion, [Fe(O₄)(Fe(OH)₂ (OH₂))₁₂]⁷⁺, has been investigated using density functional theory in order to demonstrate how the energy landscape of medium-to-large discrete paramagnetic transition metal oxide clusters with large numbers of antiferromagnetically coupled centres can be resolved. Antiferromagnetic coupling causes the energies to span a surprisingly large range of 30 kcal/mol, as determined by calculating the energies of all 664 unique spin configurations based on determination of the antiferromagnetic coupling constants by density functional theory. A program which simplifies the resolution of the energetics of this type of systems is also provided.

“Carbon Dioxide Binding in Supercooled Water Nanofilms on Nanominerals”

by Merve Yeşilbaş (now at SETI), Xiaowei Song (now at IKEA), and Jean-François Boily

You can find the article here