Effects of hydrogen bonding on supercooled liquid dynamics and the implications for supercooled water

Journal article, 2009

The supercooled state of bulk water is largely hidden by unavoidable crystallization, which creates an experimentally inaccessible temperature regime - a "no man's land." We address this, and circumvent the crystallization problem by systematically studying the supercooled dynamics of hydrogen bonded oligomeric liquids (glycols), where water corresponds to the chain ends alone. This approach permits a "dilution of water" by altering the hydrogen bond concentration via variations in chain length. We observe a dynamic crossover in the temperature dependence of the structural relaxation time for all glycols, consistent with the common behavior of most supercooled liquids. We find that the crossover becomes more pronounced for increasing hydrogen bond concentrations, which leads to the prediction of a marked dynamic transition for water within "no man's land" at T similar to 220 K. Interestingly, the predicted transition thus takes place at a temperature where a so called "strong-fragile" transition has previously been suggested. Our results, however, imply that the dynamic transition of supercooled water is analogous to that commonly observed in supercooled liquids. Moreover, we find support also for the existence of a secondary relaxation of water with behavior analogous to that of the secondary relaxation observed for the glycols.