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Supercooled liquids

Clearing the water

Nature Materials volume 11, pages 362–364 (2012)Cite this article

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Evidence of a transition between two coexisting liquids of the same composition in a water–glycerol mixture, where glycerol prevents the crystallization of water, provides a unique link to an elusive liquid–liquid transition in pure water.

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Figure 1: The 'rule of stages' postulated by Ostwald in 1897 prescribes that crystallization takes the fastest path to reach the lowest free-energy state.
Figure 2: Phase diagram of glycerol–water mixtures showing, for the HDL-like solution, the liquid–crystal equilibrium boundary (binodal line; black squares), the stability limit (spinodal line; black circles and blue line), the homogeneous-nucleation boundary for ice Ic (purple) and the glass transition temperature (red).

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  1. Austen Angell is at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA,

    Austen Angell

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Angell, A. Clearing the water. Nature Mater 11, 362–364 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3319

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