According to the research group of Professor Hajime Tanaka of the Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo, the dynamic anomaly of water, which has been explained as a peculiar glass transition phenomenon, is actually unrelated to the glass transition, and the regular tetrahedral structure of the liquid. For the first time, I found out that it was caused by the formation.
It is widely known that water has extremely unique properties not found in other liquids, such as the maximum density at XNUMX ° C. and the expansion of volume during crystallization.In addition, ordinary liquids are classified into fragile liquids (liquids that do not become glass) and strong liquids (liquids that become glass), but water exhibits peculiar behavior such as fragile at high temperatures and strong at low temperatures.Such anomalous behavior has been understood as a special glass transition phenomenon, but this time, the research group is almost positive at low temperature because of the disordered structure in which hot water does not have a regular tetrahedron structure. For the first time, we succeeded in clearly showing the transition to water with a tetrahedral structure at the molecular level.
This result not only overturned the conventional theory of dynamic anomalies of water based on glass transitions, but also that both thermodynamic and dynamic anomalies of water are based on the common origin of tetrahedral structure formation. The clarified points also have a big impact.
Water is the most important liquid for humankind, and the results of this research are expected to contribute not only to understanding the unique properties of water itself, but also to understanding its relationship with life activities and meteorological phenomena.
