Ions Tune Interfacial Water Structure and Modulate Hydrophobic Interactions at Silica Surfaces

The structure and ultrafast dynamics of the electric double layer (EDL) are central to chemical reactivity and physical properties at solid/aqueous interfaces. While the Gouy–Chapman–Stern model is widely used to describe EDLs, it is solely based on the macroscopic electrostatic attraction of electrolytes for the charged surfaces. Structure and dynamics in the Stern layer are, however, more complex because of competing effects due to the localized surface charge distribution, surface–solvent–ion correlations, and the interfacial hydrogen bonding environment. Here, we report combined time-resolved vibrational sum frequency generation (TR-vSFG) spectroscopy with ab initio DFT-based molecular dynamics simulations (AIMD/DFT-MD) to get direct access to the molecular-level understanding of how ions change the structure and dynamics of the EDL. We show that innersphere adsorbed ions tune the hydrophobicity of the silica–aqueous interface by shifting the structural makeup in the Stern layer from dominant water–surface interactions to water–water interactions. This drives an initially inhomogeneous interfacial water coordination landscape observed at the neat interface toward a homogeneous, highly interconnected in-plane 2D hydrogen bonding (2D-HB) network at the ionic interface, reminiscent of the canonical, hydrophobic air–water interface. This ion-induced transformation results in a characteristic decrease of the vibrational lifetime (T₁) of excited interfacial O–H stretching modes from T₁ ∼ 600 fs to T₁ ∼ 250 fs. Hence, we propose that the T₁ determined by TR-vSFG in combination with DFT-MD simulations can be widely used for a quantitative spectroscopic probe of the ion kosmotropic/chaotropic effect at aqueous interfaces as well as of the ion-induced surface hydrophobicity.