Speaker
Prof.
Athanassios Panagiotopoulos
(Princeton University)
Description
I plan to discuss results on the liquid–liquid transition in
the ST2 model of water recently obtained by Palmer et al.
[Nature 510: 385 (2014)]. Six advanced sampling methods were
used to compute the free-energy surface, which shows that
two metastable liquids and a stable crystal exist at the
same deeply supercooled thermodynamic condition. The
transition between the two liquids satisfies the
thermodynamic criteria of a first-order transition. These
findings provide unambiguous evidence for a liquid–liquid
transition in the ST2 model of water, and point to the
separation of time scales between crystallization and
relaxation as being crucial for enabling it.
