Towards a unified understanding of water's anomalies and glass-forming ability based on a quantitative observation of medium-range order in liquids.

水是地球上的基本物质之一，在结晶过程中表现出体积增大等反常行为。此外，众所周知，水是一种非常差的玻璃原质。然而，加入盐和施加压力会影响水分子的局部四面体有利结构，水的异常会减弱或消失。这些事实表明，中量程局部有序可能是理解玻璃形成机制和水之谜的关键。在这个项目中，我们研究了玻璃的时效，实验发现不同退火温度下的时效动力学可以在一条曲线上缩放。老化过程中焓值显著降低，表明局部排序是老化的关键过程。

Water is one of the fundamental substances on the earth and exhibits anomalous behavior such as the volume increase upon crystallization. In addition, water is known to be an exceptionally poor glass former. However, adding salt and applying pressure affect the tetrahedral locally favored structure of water molecules and the anomalies of water are weaken or disappear. These facts indicate that the medium range local ordering could be the key to understand the mechanism of the glass formation and the mystery of water. In this project, we investigated the aging of glasses and experimentally found that the aging kinetics at different annealing temperatures can be scaled on a single curve. There is a significant enthalpy decrease during aging, suggesting that the local ordering would be a key process of aging.