Supercooled liquid and amorphous solid water: experiments and simulations
By: Philip Handle
From: U. Innsbruck, Austria
At: Online - Zoom (https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/81767920005)
[2021-05-27]
Liquid water exhibits several fascinating properties that are often referred to as anomalies. One example is the well-known density maximum at 4°C, below which water expands as it is cooled. In general, the magnitude of several thermodynamic response functions increases on cooling, and they become steep when water is supercooled below its freezing point. An intriguing hypothesis put forward to explain this behaviour suggests the presence of a liquid-liquid phase separation in deeply supercooled water. This hypothesis offers an explanation not only for the behaviour of liquid water, but also for the phenomena observed in amorphous solid water ("amorphous ice").
In my talk, I will give a general overview of past and current research on supercooled liquid and amorphous solid water, highlighting my own contributions. The latter include both experiments and computer simulations. The experiments provide evidence for sharp first-order-like transitions between different types of amorphous ice and also suggest a close connection between amorphous ice and supercooled water. The simulations, on the other hand, suggest the presence of a liquid-liquid transition in the molecular model studied, and also features consistent with first-order-like amorphous-amorphous transitions are presented.
