Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
We report the first measurement of water monomer bending vibrations in gaseous (H2O)n clusters. Infrared cavity ringdown spectroscopy reveals discrete and sequentially blue-shifted bands near 6 μm for n = 2−4 and unresolved broad features for n > 4, supporting both theoretical predictions and solid-state spectroscopy results. These measurements provide a measure of the monomer distortion that accompanies sequential hydrogen bond formation, which will be valuable for the construction of potential energy surfaces for describing water.
Paul et al. (Sat,) studied this question.