Generic mechanism for generating a liquid-liquid phase transition
Files
First author draft
Date
2001-02-08
DOI
Authors
Franzese, Giancarlo
Malescio, Gianpietro
Skibinsky, Anna
Buldyrev, Sergey V.
Stanley, H. Eugene
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
Giancarlo Franzese, Gianpietro Malescio, Anna Skibinsky, Sergey V. Buldyrev, H. Eugene Stanley. 2001. "Generic mechanism for generating a liquid-liquid phase transition." NATURE, Volume 409, Issue 6821, pp. 692 - 695. https://doi.org/10.1038/35055514
Abstract
Recent experimental results1 indicate that phosphorus—a single-component system—can have a high-density liquid (HDL) and a low-density liquid (LDL) phase. A first-order transition between two liquids of different densities2 is consistent with experimental data for a variety of materials3,4, including single-component systems such as water5,6,7,8, silica9 and carbon10. Molecular dynamics simulations of very specific models for supercooled water2,11, liquid carbon12 and supercooled silica13 predict a LDL–HDL critical point, but a coherent and general interpretation of the LDL–HDL transition is lacking. Here we show that the presence of a LDL and a HDL can be directly related to an interaction potential with an attractive part and two characteristic short-range repulsive distances. This kind of interaction is common to other single-component materials in the liquid state (in particular, liquid metals 2,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21), and such potentials are often used to describe systems that exhibit a density anomaly2. However, our results show that the LDL and HDL phases can occur in systems with no density anomaly. Our results therefore present an experimental challenge to uncover a liquid–liquid transition in systems like liquid metals, regardless of the presence of a density anomaly.