  At the fundamental level, our understanding of water hydrogen-bond dynamics
has been largely built on the detailed analysis of classical molecular
simulations. The latter served to develop a plethora of hydrogen bond
definitions based on different properties, including geometrical distances,
topology and energetics. Notwithstanding, no real consensus emerged from these
approaches, making the development of a consistent and reliable definition
elusive. In this contribution, a framework to study hydrogen bonds in liquid
water based purely on kinetics is presented. This approach makes use of the
analysis of commitment probabilities without relying on arbitrarily chosen
order parameters and cutoffs. Our results provide evidence for a
self-consistent description, resulting in a clear multi-exponential behavior of
the kinetics.
