Chemical physics articles within Nature

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• Letter | 18 June 2014

  Ultrafast X-ray probing of water structure below the homogeneous ice nucleation temperature

  Femtosecond X-ray laser pulses are used to probe the structure of liquid water in micrometre-sized droplets that have been cooled below the homogeneous ice nucleation temperature, revealing the existence of metastable bulk liquid water down to temperatures of 227 kelvin.

  • J. A. Sellberg
  • , C. Huang
  •  & A. Nilsson

• Letter | 18 June 2014

  Metastable liquid–liquid transition in a molecular model of water

  A stable crystal phase and two metastable liquid phases of the ST2 model of water exist at the same deeply supercooled condition, and the two liquids undergo a first-order liquid–liquid transition that meets stringent thermodynamic criteria.

  • Jeremy C. Palmer
  • , Fausto Martelli
  •  & Pablo G. Debenedetti

• Letter | 22 December 2013

  Site- and energy-selective slow-electron production through intermolecular Coulombic decay

  Intermolecular Coulombic decay driven by resonant Auger decay can be used to produce low-energy electrons selectively from chosen molecular or atomic sites and with tunable energies, with possible applications in radiation therapy.

  • Kirill Gokhberg
  • , Přemysl Kolorenč
  •  & Lorenz S. Cederbaum

• Letter | 19 June 2013

  Defect pair separation as the controlling step in homogeneous ice melting

  Molecular dynamics simulations of melting ice have identified the spatial separation of a defect pair into its constituent components as a crucial first step: once this step has been taken, defects can persist and grow, and rapidly turn ice into liquid water.

  • Kenji Mochizuki
  • , Masakazu Matsumoto
  •  & Iwao Ohmine

• Letter | 21 December 2011

  Charge order and three-site distortions in the Verwey structure of magnetite

  X-ray diffraction is used to show that the structural distortion of magnetite below 125 kelvin is to a first approximation caused by charge ordering of its constituent iron ions, but that the localized electrons are distributed over three iron sites to form ‘trimeron’ quasiparticles.

  • Mark S. Senn
  • , Jon P. Wright
  •  & J. Paul Attfield

• Letter | 18 March 2010

  Isotope fractionation in silicate melts by thermal diffusion

  The physics of thermal diffusion — mass diffusion driven by a temperature gradient — is poorly understood. One obstacle has been that the Soret coefficient (S_T, which describes the steady-state result of thermal diffusion) is sensitive to many factors. It is now shown that the difference in S_T between isotopes of diffusing elements that are network modifiers is independent of composition and temperature. The findings suggest a theoretical approach for describing thermal diffusion in silicate melts and other complex solutions.

  • F. Huang
  • , P. Chakraborty
  •  & C. E. Lesher