Local and Traveling-wave Modes of Vibrations of Protons and Oxygens in a Finite Volume of Melted Ice in Hexagonal Close Packed Lattice

We started water study for the 2013 Annual National Fall Meeting of the Physical Society of the PRC (People’s Republic of China), at the Sah Pen-Tung 111th Anniversary Symposium on the past and future of Microelectronics Technology, to supplement the Plenary when a more knowledgeable speaker Jack Sun (TSMC CTO) was recruited.  We thought Water Physics was well known 55 years ago when Shockley showed Fig 5.1 in Hannay’s ACS Monograph No. 140 (1959) the Arrhenius plot of pH of liquid water (0–100^oC, 540meV thermal activation energy) next to semiconductor Ge (780meV) and Si (1178meV).  Our mentor Chihtang Sah decided to delay retiring from his career in transistor physics and manufacturing engineering to find out why the electrical mobilities of the negative hydroxide ion OH^– and positive hydronium ion H₃O⁺ are many times higher than the impurity ions in pure water (Na⁺, K⁺, Ca²⁺, Cl^–, I^–, F^–).   We found the Melted Ice Hexagonal Close Packed Lattice excellently modeled the liquid pure water as a Protonic Semiconductor.  We also discovered the self-induced protonic (proton and prohol) traps via absorbing the local and traveling vibration modes of protons and prohols to transport the thermal activation energy in liquid pure water from the experimental proton and prohol mobilities.