arXiv · 1711.02412
Shrinking of Rapidly Evaporating Water Microdroplets Reveals their Extreme Supercooling
Abstract
The fast evaporative cooling of micrometer-sized water droplets in vacuum offers the appealing possibility to investigate supercooled water - below the melting point but still a liquid - at temperatures far beyond the state-of-the-art. However, it is challenging to obtain a reliable value of the droplet temperature under such extreme experimental conditions. Here, the observation of morphology-dependent resonances in the Raman scattering from a stream of perfectly uniform water droplets has allowed us to measure with an absolute precision of better than 0.2% the variation in droplet size resulting from evaporative mass losses. This finding proved crucial to an unambiguous determination of the droplet temperature. In particular, a fraction of water droplets with initial diameter of 6379$\pm$12 nm were found to remain liquid down to 230.6$\pm$0.6 K. Our results question temperature estimates reported recently for larger supercooled water droplets, and provide valuable information on the hydrogen-bond network in liquid water in the hard-to-access deeply supercooled regime.
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Claudia Goy, Marco A. C. Potenza, Sebastian Dedera, Marilena Tomut, Emmanuel Guillerm, Anton Kalinin, Kay-Obbe Voss, Alexander Schottelius, Nikolaos Petridis, Alexey Prosvetov, Guzmán Tejeda, José M. Fernández, Christina Trautmann, Frédéric Caupin, Ulrich Glasmacher, Robert E. Grisenti. 2017-11-07. Shrinking of Rapidly Evaporating Water Microdroplets Reveals their Extreme Supercooling. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.120.015501
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