Liquid and Glassy Water: Two Materials of Interdisciplinary Interest

Abstract

We can superheat water above its boiling temperature and supercool it below its freezing temperature, down to approximately — 40°C, below which water inevitably crystallizes. In this deeply supercooled region, strange things happen: response functions and transport functions appear as if they might diverge to infinity at a temperature of about-45 °C. These experiments were pioneered by Angell and co-workers over the past 30 years [1, 2, 3, 4]. Down in the glassy region of water, additional strange things happen, e.g., there is not just one glassy phase [1]. Rather, just as there is more than one polymorph of crystalline water, so also there appears to be more than one polyamorph of glassy water. The first clear indication of this was a discovery of Mishima in 1985: at low pressure there is one form, called low-density amorphous (LDA) ice [5], while at high pressure Mishima discovered a new form, called highdensity amorphous (HDA) ice [6]. The volume discontinuity separating these two phases is comparable to the volume discontinuity separating low-density and high-density polymorphs of crystalline ice, 25–35 percent [7, 8].