Boson peak in deeply cooled confined water: a possible way to explore the existence of the liquid-to-liquid transition in water

Zhe Wang; Kao-Hsiang Liu; Peisi Le; Mingda Li; Wei-Shan Chiang; Juscelino B Leão; John R D Copley; Madhusudan Tyagi; Andrey Podlesnyak; Alexander I Kolesnikov; Chung-Yuan Mou; Sow-Hsin Chen

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.237802

Boson peak in deeply cooled confined water: a possible way to explore the existence of the liquid-to-liquid transition in water

Phys Rev Lett. 2014 Jun 13;112(23):237802. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.237802. Epub 2014 Jun 12.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
² Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA and Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei 10617, Taiwan, Republic of China.
³ NIST Center for Neutron Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899, USA.
⁴ NIST Center for Neutron Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899, USA and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
⁵ Spallation Neutron Source, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA.
⁶ Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106, Taiwan, Republic of China.

PMID: 24972226
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.237802

Abstract

The boson peak in deeply cooled water confined in nanopores is studied with inelastic neutron scattering. We show that in the (P, T) plane, the locus of the emergence of the boson peak is nearly parallel to the Widom line below ∼ 1600 bar. Above 1600 bar, the situation is different and from this difference the end pressure of the Widom line is estimated. The frequency and width of the boson peak correlate with the density of water, which suggests a method to distinguish the hypothetical "low-density liquid" and "high-density liquid" phases in deeply cooled water.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Cold Temperature
Models, Chemical*
Nanopores*
Neutron Diffraction / methods*
Phase Transition
Water / chemistry*

Substances

Water