Entropy-driven liquid-liquid separation in supercooled water

Abstract

Twenty years ago Poole et al. suggested that the anomalous properties of supercooled water may be caused by a critical point that terminates a line of liquid-liquid separation of lower-density and higher-density water. Here we present a thermodynamic model based on this hypothesis, which describes all available experimental data for supercooled water with better quality and fewer adjustable parameters than any other model. Liquid water at low temperatures is viewed as an 'athermal solution' of two molecular structures with different entropies and densities. Alternatively to popular models for water, in which liquid-liquid separation is driven by energy, the phase separation in the athermal two-state water is driven by entropy upon increasing the pressure, while the critical temperature is defined by the 'reaction' equilibrium constant. The model predicts the location of density maxima at the locus of a near-constant fraction of the lower-density structure.