Possible Evidence for a New Form of Liquid Buried in the Surface Tension of Supercooled Water

Abstract

Contrary to the historical data, several recent experiments indicate that the surface tension of supercooled water follows a smooth extrapolation of the IAPWS equation in the supercooled regime. It can be seen, however, that a small deviation from the IAPWS equation is present in the recent experimental measurements. It is shown with simulations using the WAIL water potential that the small deviation in the experimental data is consistent with the tail of an exponential growth in surface tension as temperature decreases. The emergence temperature, T_e, of a substantial deviation from the IAPWS equation is shown to be 227 K for the WAIL water and 235 K for real water. Since the 227 K T_e is close to the Widom line in WAIL water, we argue that real water at 235 K approaches a similar crossover line at one atmospheric pressure.