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Updated: Oct 1, 2025

Probing the Structure and Dynamics of Interfacial Water with Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Spectroscopy
Published on: May 27, 2018
Isotope effects on the structural transformation and relaxation of deeply supercooled water
Loni Kringle1, Wyatt A Thornley1, Bruce D Kay1
1Physical Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, P.O. Box 999, Richland, Washington 99352, USA.
Abstract:
We have examined the structure of supercooled liquid D2O as a function of temperature between 185 and 255 K using pulsed laser heating to rapidly heat and cool the sample on a nanosecond timescale. The liquid structure can be represented as a linear combination of two structural motifs, with a transition between them described by a logistic function centered at 218 K with a width of 10 K. The relaxation to a metastable state, which occurred prior to crystallization, exhibited nonexponential kinetics with a rate that was dependent on the initial structural configuration. When the temperature is scaled by the temperature of maximum density, which is an isostructural point of the isotopologues, the structural transition and the non-equilibrium relaxation kinetics of D2O agree remarkably well with those for H2O.
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