Optical Kerr effect of liquid and supercooled water: the experimental and data analysis perspective

The time-resolved optical Kerr effect spectroscopy (OKE) is a powerful experimental tool enabling accurate investigations of the dynamic phenomena in molecular liquids. We introduced innovative experimental and fitting procedures, that enable a safe deconvolution of sample response function from the instrumental function. This is a critical issue in order to measure the dynamics of liquid water. We report OKE data on water measuring intermolecular vibrations and the structural relaxation processes in an extended temperature range, inclusive of the supercooled states. The unpreceded data quality makes possible a solid comparison with few theoretical models: the multi-mode Brownian oscillator model, the Kubo's discrete random jump model, and the schematic mode-coupling model. All these models produce reasonable good fits of the OKE data of stable liquid water, i.e., over the freezing point. The features of water dynamics in the OKE data becomes unambiguous only at lower temperatures, i.e., for water in the metastable supercooled phase. We found that the schematic mode-coupling model provides the more rigorous and complete model for water dynamics, even if its intrinsic hydrodynamic approach does not give a direct access to the molecular information.