Manipulating the Flipping of Water Dipoles in Carbon Nanotubes

Flipping of water dipoles in carbon nanotubes is of great importance in many physical and biological applications, such as signal amplification, molecular switches and nano-gates. Ahead of these applications, understanding and inhibiting the non-negligible thermal noise is essential. Here, we use molecular dynamics simulations to show that the flipping frequency of water dipoles increases with the rising temperature, and the thermal noise can be suppressed by imposed charges and external uniform electric fields. Furthermore, the water dipoles flip periodically between two equiprobable and stable states under alternating electric fields. These two stable states may be adopted to store 0 and 1 bits for memory storage or molecular computing.