We are organizing an international conference entitled “Aqueous Systems: The Frontier and Beyond” in Kalamata, Greece, during June 16 – 21, 2025. This is a sequel of the series of meetings on this general science domain first organized as a NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) in Elounda, Crete, Greece in 1997 and subsequently in Fodele, Crete, Greece in 2008. The intent is to bring together experimental and theoretical practitioners in the field of aqueous solvation to (i) assess the current state of the art, (ii) identify major challenges that impede progress and (iii) develop a roadmap for future advancements in the field.

Purpose

The international meeting will bring together both experimental and theoretical chemists who study the properties of water to record the current state-of-the-art in the field and jointly assess future plans for addressing still unsolved problems in the field.

Scientific Background

The important function of water in sustaining life on earth through its participation in numerous chemical and biological processes has rightly led to great scientific interest in its properties as a neat substance and as a universal solvent. Aqueous environments play a critical role in maintaining the balance of our ecosystem. Information at the molecular level about those systems is central to our understanding of important processes such as reaction and solvation in a variety of homogeneous and heterogeneous media. In particular, the fundamental structural, thermodynamic, and spectral properties of aqueous systems are relevant to solvation phenomena, the reactivity and transport properties of clathrate hydrates, in homogeneous catalysis and in oceanic and atmospheric processes. Experimental probes and theoretical models are commonly jointly employed in order to decipher the properties of water in its various forms, the solvation of chemical and biological species, and the aqueous interfaces with various materials. The need has therefore risen to develop robust experimental and theoretical approaches that can be used as predictive tools to model solvation, reaction, and transport in aqueous environments. The development of those tools is particularly hindered by the “anomalous” behavior of the macroscopic properties of water when compared to other chemically similar hydrogen bonded liquids. Typical examples of these anomalies consist of the density maximum at 4 °C, the nonmonotonic behavior of its compressibility with temperature, the anomalous behavior of its relaxation time below typical temperatures of the human body, the large value and nonmonotonic dependence below 35 °C of the specific heat of constant pressure, and the smaller than expected value of the coefficient of thermal expansion, just to name a few. These irregularities cannot be reproduced with simple models, as explicit molecular-level information needs to be accounted for in order to capture the appropriate physics at the molecular level. To this end, more complicated approaches based on the high-level quantum mechanical description of the relevant interactions need to be employed.

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