Liquid-liquid phase transition model incorporating evidence for ferroelectric state near the lambda-point anomaly in supercooled water

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified theoretical model that combines liquid-liquid and ferroelectric phase transitions to explain the lambda-point anomaly in supercooled water, accounting for experimental and simulation data.

Contribution

It presents a novel combined model that explains the lambda-point anomaly in water by linking ferroelectric and liquid-liquid phase transitions.

Findings

The model predicts a ferroelectric transition near 233K in supercooled water.

It explains the large dielectric constant observed experimentally.

The model aligns well with existing experimental and simulation results.

Abstract

We propose a unified model combining the first-order liquid-liquid and the second-order ferroelectric phase transitions models and explaining various features of the $\lambda$-point of liquid water within a single theoretical framework. It becomes clear within the proposed model that not only does the long-range dipole-dipole interaction of water molecules yield a large value of dielectric constant $\epsilon$ at room temperatures, our analysis shows that the large dipole moment of the water molecules also leads to a ferroelectric phase transition at a temperature close to the lambda-point. Our more refined model suggests that the phase transition occurs only in the low density component of the liquid and is the origin of the singularity of the dielectric constant recently observed in experiments with supercooled liquid water at temperature T~233K. This combined model agrees well with nearly every available set of experiments and explains most of the well-known and even recently obtained results of MD simulations.