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arXiv · 2604.00794

Glassy Signatures in Water's Second Liquid

Florian Pabst·Ali Hassanali
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Abstract

The origin of water's anomalous behavior remains a central open problem in the physical sciences and is often attributed to a liquid-liquid transition (LLT) between high- and low-density liquid states deep in the supercooled regime. Experimental access to this region has been challenging due to rapid crystallization, leaving atomistic simulations as a major source of supporting evidence. Using extensive machine-learning-accelerated first-principles simulations in direct comparison with spectroscopic, structural, and dynamical experimental measurements, we show that features commonly interpreted as signatures of two-liquid behavior coincide with the onset of dramatic dynamical slowing down characteristic of an emerging non-ergodic glassy state. Specifically, we find that two-state fluctuations associated with an LLT, are also consistent with a transformation from a high-density liquid to a kinetically constrained low-density glassy-like state. By mapping equilibrium dynamics across pressure and temperature, our results call for a closer examination of water's metastable landscape, in which two-state behavior may reflect a relatively high glass-transition temperature of low-density water, 189~$\pm$~8 K---curiously close to the temperature commonly associated with the proposed LLT.

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Florian Pabst, Ali Hassanali. 2026-04-01. Glassy Signatures in Water's Second Liquid. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00794

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