The structural origin of anomalous properties of liquid water
Anders Nilsson & Lars G. M. Pettersson
Affiliations Corresponding author
Nature Communications 6, Article number: 8998
doi:10.1038/ncomms9998
Received 09 June 2015 Accepted 26 October 2015 Published 08 December 2015
(a) Schematic picture of a hypothetical phase diagram of liquid water. (b) Schematic diagram of the temperature dependence with respect to the Widom line of a thermodynamic response function.
Abstract
Water is unique in its number of unusual, often called anomalous, properties. When hot it is a normal simple liquid; however, close to ambient temperatures properties, such as the compressibility, begin to deviate and do so increasingly on further cooling. Clearly, these emerging properties are connected to its ability to form up to four well-defined hydrogen bonds allowing for different local structural arrangements. A wealth of new data from various experiments and simulations has recently become available. When taken together they point to a heterogeneous picture with fluctuations between two classes of local structural environments developing on temperature-dependent length scales.
Subject terms: Physical sciences Physical chemistry Fluids and plasma physics
FREE PDF GRATIS: Nature Communications