Preferential solvation dynamics in liquids: how geodesic pathways through the potential energy landscape reveal mechanistic details about solute relaxation in liquids

It is not obvious that many-body phenomena as collective as solute energy relaxation in liquid solution should ever have identifiable molecular mechanisms, at least not in the sense of the well-defined sequence of molecular events one often attributes to chemical reactions. What can define such mechanisms, though, are the most efficient relaxation paths that solutions take through their potential energy landscapes. When liquid dynamics is dominated by slow diffusive processes, there are mathematically precise and computationally accessible routes to searching for such paths. We apply this observation to the dynamics of preferential solvation, the relaxation around a newly excited solute by a solvent composed of different components with different solvating abilities. The slow solvation seen experimentally in these mixtures stems from the dual needs to compress the solvent and to do solvent-solvent exchanges near the solute. By studying the geodesic (most efficient) paths for this combined process in a simple atomic liquid mixture, we show that the mechanism for preferential solvation features a reasonably sharp onset for slow diffusion, and that this diffusion involves a sequential, rather than concerted, series of solvent exchanges.