Probing hydrogen-bonding in binary liquid mixtures with terahertz time-domain spectroscopy: a comparison of Debye and absorption analysis

Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy is used to explore hydrogen bonding structure and dynamics in binary liquid mixtures, spanning a range of protic–protic, protic–aprotic and aprotic–aprotic systems. A direct absorption coefficient analysis is compared against more complex Debye analysis and we observed good agreement of the two methods in determining the hydrogen bonding properties when at least one of the mixture components is protic. When both components are aprotic, we show that the trend in absorption coefficients match well with the theoretical trend in strength of hydrogen bond interactions predicted based on steric and electronic properties of the components.