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This week's WCPM seminar will start at the earlier time of 12.30pm with a presentation from current Hetsys students, followed by the main seminar at 1pm.

Title: The Phase Behavior of Supercooled Water: A Computational Perspective
WCPM: Pablo Debenedetti (Princeton)

Abstract: Water plays a central role in the physical and chemical processes that sustain life as we know it. Its ubiquity and importance notwithstanding, there remain major open questions concerning water's physical properties, which are anomalous by comparison to those of most other liquids. Examples include the fact the liquid, if sufficiently cold, expands when cooled and becomes less viscous when compressed. Water's oddities become more pronounced at low temperatures, especially in the supercooled regime, where the liquid is metastable with respect to crystallization. The existence of a phase transition between two liquid forms of water, terminating at a critical point under deeply supercooled conditions, has been proposed as a thermodynamically consistent way of interpreting experimental observations. After discussing the experimental evidence, I will provide a computational perspective on water's liquid-liquid transition and on metastable criticality. Computer simulation, powered by advanced sampling algorithms, has played an important role in defining the frontiers of knowledge on supercooled water's still incompletely understood phase behavior.