Nucleation and glassy dynamics in liquids and nanoparticles

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Water, the liquid that bathes our planet and is essential for life, is a strange substance. For example, its thermal expansion coefficient, specific heat and compressibility all show anomalous behavior compared to simple substances, the latter two appearing to diverge at low temperature. A hypothesis that accounts for water's anomalous behaviour sounds stranger still: the existence of two distinct metastable liquid forms of water separated by a line of first order transitions that terminates in a liquid-liquid critical point (LLCP) thought to exist at pressures between 50-200MPa and temperatures below -50°C. Despite an increasing body of experimental evidence consistent with this hypothesis and a growing number of computer simulations of water-like models that exhibit this exotic phenomenon, no experiment has directly shown the liquid-liquid transition, since none has successfully avoided the rapid crystallization that prevents the study of the liquid state in the temperature and pressure range of the proposed LLCP.