Six-Water Proton Wire: From Symmetry to Asymmetry via Double Tilt, and Falsifiable Tests

This article gives a short, testable framework for steering proton transfer in a six-water wire attached to a single host molecule. The system has two protonation sites (L and R) bridged by W1–W6. A pump–probe readout breaks the same cold cluster and counts L vs R fragments after a chosen delay, producing an occupancy meter fR(Δt)f_R(\Delta t)fR(Δt) that is simple to fit and hard to fake. Three knobs organize control: bias (tilt) sets the long-time fraction, drive and opposition set rise speed and latency. We extract compact metrics (latency B, leakage L, small-bias curvature 2f, forward/backward rates) and report thresholds with a single corrected gate Reff=D/(O+αTz∗)R_{\mathrm{eff}}=D/(O+\alpha T_z^\ast)Reff=D/(O+αTz∗). External benchmarks anchor expectations: microsecond, microcanonical kinetics in a six-water 4-ABA cluster (cryogenic trap), and a three-water onset for vibrationally induced transfer. The test set is falsifiable by design: flip-only Z (reverse bias), disable-only L (remove a bridge water), T1 co-flip (local storage leads update), monotonic-to-plateau at Reff≈1R_{\mathrm{eff}}\approx 1Reff≈1, dose–response of bias, isotope swap off-lane (H→D), and crosslink kill in a widened network. A proposed 6-long by 4-wide variant uses a double tilt (axial + lateral) and a lane-selective “offramp vise” to funnel trajectories into one fast lane while keeping the same readout. The result is a compact yardstick for experiment and a clean target for DFT/MD/ML models: match the fR(Δt)f_R(\Delta t)fR(Δt) curves and metric trends, or fail.