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# The "exclusion zone" is a dielectric
Water above the adsorbate behaves like a "dielectric". The molecules are polarized by the electric field from the hydroxide-rich adsorbate and the hydronium-rich bulk water, they orient themselves opposite to the field, and in doing so they partly cancel out the external field. Anyone who attempts to measure the electrostatic potential will therefore measure a weaker field than what is actually there. The "exclusion zone" is an insulator in that it has very few hydronium and hydroxide ions. Since it is ordered into honeycomb sheets separated by hydrogen atoms, similar to ice but each layer shifted one oxygen atom, it does not want to dissolve particles or ions - including hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions. The particles "prefer" to be in the adjacent bulk water instead, and this is where the H+ released from the 2-3 atomic layer thick adsorbate near the surface originate from, which is the source of the electric field that polarizes and orders the "exlusion zone" to begin with.
The "exclusion zone" as a dielectric has cancelled out a lot of the electric field between the adsorbate and bulk water, which reduces the attractive force between the OH- and H+ ions, and reduces the tendency for the ions to recombine. This increases the degree of ionization within the adsorbate. This decrease in recombination is on top of that the "exclusion zone" physically separated the ions to start with by not dissolving hydrogen ions. There is thus three effects lowering recombination, the initial charge separation from asymmetry in charge carrier mobility in adsorbate, the exclusion zone as a hydrogen ion insulator, and the exclusion zone as a dielectric that partly cancels out the electric field.
The "exclusion zone" has weakened the electric field which allows H+ ions from adsorbate to diffuse further out in the bulk. Pollack has shown pH 5.5 up to 10 mm outwards (homogenous, the whole region pH 5.5 and beyond that normal water at pH 7). Since the adsorbate is the source of the H+, and it is 2-3 atomic layers thick, 1 nm, we can know its degree of ionization. If we compress the hydrogen ions in the low pH region into a volume the same as the thickness of the adsorbate, that is a 10^7 times compression, which gives us a molarity of 10^-5.5*10^7, roughly 50% of the molarity of water. This fits perfectly with the phase Gerald Pollack has intuited, that he calls the "fourth phase". It's honeycomb sheets, but the hydrogen atoms between the sheets have been expelled (as ions) and the sheets have collapsed onto one another, shifting half an oxygen atom relative one another to the electrostatically preferred position. The way this phase forms is likely gradual. The asymmetry in how mobile the charge carriers are leads to a small amount of ionization (a bit more than auto-ionization in liquid water since recombination is reduced, but not too much) as it exchanges hydrogen ions out to the bulk water. The electric field formed polarizes nearby water, forming a rudimentary insulator for protons which lowers the recombination, and cancels the field partly which also lowers the recombination. These three effects then continue and it gradually increases the degree of ionization in the adsorbate. Once it reaches a threshold, the remaining hydrogen are not enough to separate the atomic layers, thus the phase collapses into the "fourth phase" with 50% ionization, (H3O2-)n.